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VITAL ELEMENTS OF PREACHING 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

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MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

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TORONTO 



VITAL ELEMENTS 
OF PREACHING 



BY 



ARTHUR S. HOYT 

PBOFESSOB OF HOMILETICS AND SOCIOLOGY 
IN AUBURN THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
AUTHOB OF 
"TH2 WORK OF PREACHING/' AND " THE PREACHER 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1914 

All right* reserved 









Copyright, 1914, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1914. 



NottoootJ $r«B 

J. 8. Cushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



SEP 24 1914 

©CI.A379620 



XTo 

JAMES STEVENSON RIGGS 

COLLEAGUE, NEIGHBOR, 
FRIEND OP MANY TEARS 



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o<) 



PREFACE 

( These lectures were given at the University 
of Chicago, in the summer term of nineteen 
hundred and twelve, and for three years to 
senior classes at Auburn Seminary. x The re- 
sponse of students encourages the hope that 
they may be helpful to a wider circle of readers. 

To those who have read the author's previous 
works on preaching, " The Work of Preaching," 
and "The Preacher," the present book will 
seem a nearer approach to the secret of effective 
preaching. 

"The Work of Preaching" dealt with the 
sources and formation of the sermon for the 
present age ; " The Preacher " placed emphasis 
upon a vital, spiritual personality in giving the 
message ; " The Vital Elements of Preaching " 
touches the temper of the man both as to the 
truth and the lives of his hearers. Preaching 
is a social virtue. " Nothing can be more funda- 
mental to the preacher than his humanity." 
The deepest needs and desires of the age must 
be felt in his life, if his word interprets aright 
the Gospel of the new man. 



viii Preface 

The book discusses the psychology of preach- 
ing, though without formal and philosophical 
analysis. It always has in mind the question, 
How shall we speak so as to help men into the 
largest life? It is sent forth with the hope 
that it may help many into fuller faith in the 
divineness of preaching. 

ARTHUR S. HOYT. 

Auburn, N.Y., 
May 15, 1914. 





CONTENTS 








OHAPTEI 
I. 


PAGE 

The Called Man 3 


n. 


The Open Door 






25 


in. 


The Vision of Man . 






49 


IV. 


The Secret of the Heart 






71 


v. 


The Human Touch . 






95 


VI. 


The Ministry of Comfort 






117 


VII. 


The Children's Portion . 






. 141 


VIII. 


A Man's Gospel 






. 163 


IX. 


The Preacher's Growth 






185 


X. 


The Preacher and his Age 






205 


XI. 


Simplicity of Speech 






223 


XII. 


The Cost of Preaching . 






243 


XIII. 


The Sense of Message . 






265 


XIV. 


Positive Preaching . 






291 


XV. 


The Master's Method 






307 



IX 



LECTURE I. THE GALLED MAN 

Isaiah 6 : 1-8. " Also I heard the voice of the 
Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go 
for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me." 









I' 



LECTURE I 

The Called Man 

It is a great thing to have a large view of 
truth, and know one's relation to it ; to have 
a clear view of life, to see life clear, and to 
see life whole, and to know one's part in it. 

The Christian ministry is a calling that 
depends upon its vision of truth and life, and 
its sense of relation to them. The older 
divines emphasized the divine call to the 
ministry. Whatever be the theory, the con- 
viction of calling must be none the less sure. 
We are here because we feel that we are 
chosen men. 

I am not sure that the Christian preacher 
is chosen of God more than other men. 
There has been rightly a great widening of 
the idea of service. God is not only the God 
of the hills, but also of the valleys. The 
Incarnation tells us that God has cleansed 
human life and nothing is to be called common 
or unclean. All life may be full of God and 
all work his service. 

" Honest toil is holy service ; faithful work is praise 
and prayer." 

3 



4 Vital Elements of Preaching 

The largest duty is the sanctification of the 
commonplace. The priesthood of the be- 
liever is the New Testament conception of 
life, and the realization of this thought in the 
manifold ways of life is perhaps the strongest 
reason for the lessened number of preachers 
and the forces of righteousness beyond the 
limits of the church. 

No doubt Mr. Hughes and Mr. Roosevelt 
are chosen men quite as much as Mr. Beecher 
or Mr. Moody. There are chosen sons of 
Science and Literature as well as of Religion. 
Burns saw the spirit of Scotland calling him. 

" I saw thee seek the sounding shore, 
Delighted with the dashing roar ; 
Or when the North his fleecy store 

Drove through the sky, 
I saw grim Nature's visage hoar 

Struck thy young eye." 

And Wordsworth felt himself a dedicated 
spirit. He must follow the call of poetry 
or sin greatly. 

No man can do his work as he ought, unless 
he feels that he is where God wishes him to be ; 
unless he have sooner or later the divine 
sanction on his work. The preacher, above 
all other men to-day, because of the nature 
of his work as a ministry to the soul and 
because of its peculiar difficulty and danger, 



The Called Man 5 

needs the assurance that he is called of 
God. 

So, in the vital elements of preaching, the 
man comes first. And it is well for us to 
study the called man, as found especially in 
the experience of Isaiah. 

Some of the most interesting and impressive 
parts of the Bible are the records of the calling 
out of men for some especial service. What 
variety in these calls as to age and social con- 
dition ! Amos, the prophet of social right- 
eousness, was called from his flocks and 
herds, the shepherd of Tekoa. Hosea, the 
prophet of the divine betrothal, was a poet 
and a patriot, a man of noble gifts and large 
experiences. Moses was trained in the most 
splendid court of his times, and Elijah, rough 
and bold, flitted from court to desert in coarse 
and unkept raiment; Peter and John were 
the untutored fishermen of Galilee, and Paul 
was the master of the highest culture of his age. 

Samuel heard the call of God as a young 
man in the Tabernacle, while Moses, an old 
man in the desert, felt the divine impulse 
that must be followed. John brought the 
enthusiasm and the sensitiveness of youth to 
the Master's school, while Matthew left the 
habits and work of manhood to follow and 
proclaim the new teaching. 







6 Vital Elements of Preaching 

The history of the Christian pulpit fur- 
nishes couDtless parallels to this variety in 
God's calls. There is no fixed age or condi- 
tion for God's use. While the special de- 
mands of the modern pulpit call for youth 
and long training, God has always called 
his special messengers in ways men have 
little thought. Many a preacher like Paul 
has not been taught his message of man. 

Men like Basil, Chrysostom, Ambrose; 
Bossuet, Bourdaloue ; Barrow, Jeremy Tay- 
lor, Liddon ; Brooks, — had the advantage of 
wealth and social position, the most famous 
schools and teachers; while Bunyan and 
Spurgeon, Parker and Moody, rose like 
Lincoln from the undistinguished mass, not 
by favor of birth or school, but by the irre- 
sistible force of their own nature and vision. 
Spurgeon, Parker, Maclaren were preachers 
while still in their teens. Chrysostom began 
at 39, and Augustine at 36. A man may 
begin his prophetic work at any age. But 
a test of his call is his desire to make good 
his deficiencies. John Knox began the study 
of Greek at 42, and then turned to Hebrew 
at 49. 

I think the experiences of the prophets 
often come as personal and practical lessons 
to the modern preacher. The Apostles had 



The Called Man 7 

the extraordinary work of establishing the 
infant Church, of putting the fact and truths 
of Christ in imperishable form. In a cer- 
tain sense that peculiar work can never be 
repeated. But the work of the prophets 
is ever going on. They were identified with 
their people. They felt the social oneness 
of the community. They came from the 
people; they spoke to them, and their fate 
was involved in the fate of the nation. The 
prophetic office was to their age what the 
pulpit is to this. They spoke for God. 
They were the moral and religious teachers 
of their age. They sustained personal reli- 
gion. Like a rock in the desert, to use the 
striking and beautiful figure of Isaiah, they 
kept men from being overwhelmed by the 
silt of the desert sands, by the drift of the 
evil times. Under their influence fruitful 
lives sprang up, and their words of hope were 
the shadow of a rock in a weary land. "The 
Lord hath given me the tongue of a disciple 
that I should know how to speak a word in 
season to him that is weary." 

The prophets were the greatest force in 
the higher life of the nation. Principal 
George Adam Smith suggestively says, in 
"The Prophets as Preachers to their own 
Times' ' : "Almost everywhere the prophets 



8 Vital Elements of Preaching 

began to speak to the new generations ; from 
the time of the Reformation to our own, 
there never has been a city of Protestant 
Europe which has been stirred to higher 
ideals of justice and purity, without the 
reawaking of those ancient voices which 
declared to Jacob his sin and to Israel his 
transgression. The fidelity which sought 
to discover what the prophets actually meant 
to the men of their own time was rewarded 
by the inspiration of their message to the 
men of all times." 

The calls of the prophets, from their 
far-away tone, may seem to us exceptional 
and unusual. But look through the wrap- 
pings of circumstance and I am sure we shall 
find the truth common to all men. The 
truths that made Isaiah a prophet may be 
the very same that call us into our work and 
sustain us in it. And I cannot think of an 
efficient pulpit living under less heavenly 
motives and sanctions. The called man has 
a vision of God, a vision of human need, and a 
vision of opportunity. 

Some vision of God is the first element of 
a man's call. Isaiah was twenty years old 
when he had the vision of God. He was a 
native of Jerusalem, probably of royal birth. 
He knew the court and the social fife of the 



The Called Man 9 

city. He saw the outer prosperity and devo- 
tion to religious form, but he saw also the 
inner corruption, the avarice and cruelty and 
lust of the leaders, the moral dulness and 
brutality of the multitude. 

Uzziah, the great king, had been smitten 
by Jehovah. He lay at last dead in his 
palace. The young nobleman Isaiah passed 
with others into the chamber of death. His 
imagination was oppressed by the stillness 
of the palace. This, then, was the end of 
greatness. The glory of man was only for 
the dust. He passes from the palace to 
the temple. He goes into the place where 
the Invisible and Eternal is worshipped. 
The forms of human pride and splendour 
vanish ; even the ways by which man would 
express his sense of the Infinite pass from 
sight, and God alone remains. He fills 
the temple in majesty and glory. God is 
the high and holy one. 

"In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw 
the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and 
lifted up, and his train filled the temple. 
Above his head stood the seraphim; each 
one had six wings; with twain he covered 
his face, and with twain he covered his feet, 
and with twain he did fly, and one cried unto 
another and said, Holy, Holy, Holy is the 



10 Vital Elements of Preaching 

Lord of Hosts ; the whole earth is full of his 
glory" (Isaiah 6: 1-3). 

The glory of God, the high and holy one, 
the transcendent God, — that was the first 
message to Isaiah. That his whole life is 
controlled by the vision is seen by his proph- 
ecy. As all knowledge is vision to Paul, 
from his great experience on the Damascus 
road, so Isaiah is ever trying vainly to express 
the conception of the Eternal One. "As 
high as the heavens are above the earth, so 
are his thoughts above our thoughts." 

The majesty and holiness of God are the 
first message. But the nearness of God is 
also taught. There is some slight foretaste 
of the graciousness of Christ's revelation, 
not to overwhelm the finite spirit, but to 
draw it to the higher. "The earth is full 
of his glory." And that the further message 
of God's nearness was learned by the prophet 
is shown by his words. Where else before 
Christ is there such expression of the par- 
ticular and personal interest of God in all 
that concerns his creatures? "O Lord, 
thou art my God ; I will exalt thee, I will 
praise thy name. Thou hast been a strong- 
hold to the poor, a stronghold to the needy 
in his distress, a refuge from the storm, a 
shadow from the heat, when the blast of the 



The Called Man 11 

terrible ones is as a storm against the wall" 
(Isaiah 25: 1-4). 

God's pity for his people, his interest in 
everything that concerns human life, comes 
from the vision of his majesty. 

Every called man has the vision of God, 
this all-possessing sense of the presence of 
God. And life will be a call, a mission, a 
divine service, in proportion to the fulness 
and vividness of the vision. Both thoughts 
of God are needed to make the strong call, 
the majesty of God, and the nearness of God, 
his transcendence and his immanence. 

In the thought of to-day the immanence 
of God is emphasized. He is in the processes 
of nature and in the ways of men. 

"He is closer to us than breathing, 
Nearer than hands and feet." 

His highest expression is in humanity. 
God does as the best human life would wish 
to do. 

But there may be a weakness and little- 
ness without the sense of the glory of God. 
God is too great to be put into postulates 
of reason. And in the presence of the stu- 
pendous mystery of being, it should not be 
hard to sympathize with Matthew Arnold's 
hesitation to call the Almighty God a per- 



12 Vital ^Elements of Preaching 

son, as we understand that term. A demo- 
cratic age is tempted to pull the loftiest 
conceptions down to its own level. Men 
have somewhat lightly said that in a demo- 
cratic society men elect their own God. 
In a critical and flippant age, when it is 
easier to jest than to pray, when the most 
sacred things are treated with irreverent 
touch, there is need of the conception of 
God as a high and Holy One. If modern 
theology, in advance of the old, has dwelt 
upon the kinship of God and man, do we 
not need the vision of the infinite perfections 
of God, to solemnize and deepen our thoughts, 
to make us walk humbly, to give us instant 
and complete obedience ? 

In manifold ways the vision of God may 
come to men. Many a soul has had a new 
sense of God, which has subdued the whole 
nature, before some majestic force of Nature. 
We lift up our eyes to the hills ; their lofty 
forms suggest the mystery and sublimity 
of God. Coleridge's hymn in the Valley of 
Chamouni is the expression of many a 
devout soul. 

"0 dread and silent mount, I gazed upon thee, 
Till thou, still present to the bodily sense, 
Didst vanish from my thought. Entranced in prayer, 
I worshipped the Invisible alone." 



The Called Man 13 

Some striking providence, as in Luther's 
case, some critical event in which the life 
had seemed as helpless as a bit of driftwood 
on the illimitable sea, has made God known. 
God is found even in the crowded ways of 
men. 

" His heart is millions merged in one, 
And thro the world it beats." 

Devout lives are a mirror that reflect the 
beauty of the Holy One. Happy the man 
whose earliest lessons were of God, to whom 
the thought of home suggests the thought of 
God, who has never departed from the 
Father's face. 

It is a commonplace to say that the study 
of Christ, thought of him, and service for 
him, all that belongs to his kingdom, should 
make God real. The willing learner will 
have moments when the glory of God shines 
in the face of Jesus Christ, and all else is 
nought to that vision. 

To have the sense of divine call, it must 
be a personal vision of God. We must use 
the ordinary means of spiritual knowledge, 
— study, meditation, prayer, duty, service ; 
but every soul cries for that sense of God, 
that inner light that might be likened to an 
immediate vision. Men may call it mystical ; 



14 Vital Elements of Preaching 

it has been the possession of all great souls, 
it has been the gift and the authority of all 
the great voices of the Church. When the 
late Dr. Henry B. Smith of Union Seminary 
was crossing the Atlantic on his way to Ger- 
many, as a young man, restless with current 
thoughts about the Gospel, dreading the 
future and desiring above all to be true, he 
had such a vision of Christ as the heart of 
revelation, as the centre and soul and goal 
of human progress, that he never doubted 
again. 

The called man must have the vision of 
human need. It will be his own need first. 
The vision of God always makes a man feel 
his sin. That was the thought of Moses 
in the silence of the desert as he caught the 
vision of God and his call. "Who am I?" 
The young priest Ezekiel felt the same way. 
When in the vision he has given us in the 
first chapter, suited to the subtle and pro- 
found nature of the man, he had some con- 
ception of the glory of God, he fell flat on 
his face in the dust. Peter, the manliest 
and frankest of the Apostles, before the sudden 
vision of the supernal nature of Jesus, said 
impulsively, "Depart from me, Lord! for 
I am a sinful man." And Isaiah, before the 
vision of the High and Holy One, with the 



The Called Man 15 

voices of the thrice holy in his ears, felt his 
own sin. " Woe is me : I am a man of un- 
clean lips." The sense of imperfection is 
the attitude of honest, reverent manhood. 
Every added vision of God will deepen this 
sense of sin. Every true conception of 
Christ will sharpen a man's self -estimate, 
and that will add to the thought of ill- 
desert. 

Some of your experience may be as that 
of one I knew in my student days. His 
life had been one of natural piety. No sharp, 
dark moments had ever broken the smooth 
and easy flow of the years. And now he was 
going forth to his work, but with no mighty 
compulsion. He felt that his experience 
should be deepened if he were to have a 
message of life. He prayed and struggled 
for a more vivid conception of Christ; and 
it came through a look into his own heart, 
at the depth of selfishness and unbelief, 
and a new sense of need and the divine for- 
giveness. I doubt whether any man is 
called to preach the Gospel of Redemption 
who has not felt in some deep sense the guilt 
of sin and his need of pardon and cleansing. 
Is not this the trouble with the easy descrip- 
tions of the religion of the future — reli- 
gion the achievement of the cultivated few, 



16 Vital Elements of Preaching 

and not the necessary life of every man, the 
ignoring of the deep, elemental struggle be- 
tween the good and evil, that spiritual prog- 
ress is a battle with the beast ? 

The vision of human need is not only 
personal, but social. It identifies self with 
the sin and suffering and struggle of men. 
"And I dwelt amongst a people of unclean 
lips." There is no sense of superiority, and 
separation from men. The people were 
his people and their life was his life. His 
patriotism was a part of his religion. He felt 
the shame of the national sin as his own. He 
was identified in a thousand ways with the 
men about him. 

A sense of social solidarity is a part of 
every full vision of human need. We are 
part of a people of unclean lips. We are 
involved in the weakness and guilt of the 
age. The progress of civilization so far is 
over the buried hopes and broken bodies of 
multitudes. The mark of blood, the blood 
of the helpless and the innocent, is on the 
clothes we wear, and the food we take. The 
growing social consciousness must give a 
more penetrative and inclusive definition 
of sin, a keener sensitiveness to human 
relation and action. To us belongeth con- 
fusion of face. The sense of social sin 



The Called Man 17 

should keep us from all hardness and cen- 
soriousness and self-righteousness, and fill 
us with a divine pity for the multitudes. 

The sense of lack, of moral defect, the 
humility that knows and confesses it has not 
attained, is the condition of all growth, use, 
leadership in religious life. There is no 
conflict between true self-respect and the 
deepest humility. In fact, the nobler expres- 
sion of self is born of the meek and lowly 
spirit. A man is never so much himself 
as when he bows before God. A man must 
be beaten out of all self-conceit before God 
can make any large use of him. The child- 
like spirit is the path of spiritual greatness. 
A self-satisfied man cannot understand 
God's voice, and is often saying "not so, 
Lord" to the simplest commands of Christ. 

God pardons the humble soul. The joy 
of forgiveness must precede any real teach- 
ing of transgressors God's ways. The moral 
majesty and the eternal compassion of God 
mast be felt before his word shall command 
the life. The live coal from the altar touches 
the lips. Iniquity is taken away and sin 
is purged. Fellowship is restored. Love 
makes the soul ready. Love constrains. 
Nothing can be too great for love to offer. 

The called man has the vision of opportunity. 



18 Vital Elements of Preaching 

"Whom shall I send and who will go for 
us?" You will notice that it is an invita- 
tion, and not a command. God does not 
wish any unwilling messengers, any slaves, 
driven to their tasks by the lash, but sons, 
friends, co-workers, who regard service as 
the privilege of love, and cooperation with 
the Master as the highest human honor. 
We need to bring all the motives to bear 
upon our work and not to despise the lowest. 
The stern sense of duty may need often to 
compel us or hold us to our tasks. And 
duty is the voice of God, and " wears the 
Godhead's most benignant grace." But the 
power that most effectively constrains is 
love, Phillips Brooks compares the second- 
ary motives of the ministry (such as the 
joy of work, the love of influence, the per- 
ception of moral order, the concern for truth) 
and the chief motive (the realized value of 
the human soul, the passion for humanity) 
to the staff around the commanding officer. 

"'I am not convinced by what you say. 
I am not sure but that I can answer every 
one of your arguments/ said a man, with 
whom a preacher had been pleading; 'but 
there is one thing which I confess I cannot 
understand. It puzzles me, and makes me 
feel a power in what you say. It is why you 



The Called Man 19 

should care enough for me to take all this 
trouble, and to labour with me as if you cared 
for my soul.' It is a power which every 
man must feel. It inspires the preacher; 
and his hearers, catching its influence, be- 
come softened and ready to receive the truth. 
It is strength in the arm which strikes, and 
tenderness in the rock which receives the 
blow." (" Lectures on Preaching," page 257.) 

Isaiah saw the need of his people. He felt 
their tragic failure to live as the chosen of 
God. He saw the opportunity to give the 
word of warning, of judgment, of comfort and 
hope. The soul of the prophet responded to 
the call. "Here am I. Send me." There 
was entire freedom, and entire committal. 

The vision of God and of human need is 
our opportunity. We cannot fail to see 
it as we look at modern life. Men all 
around us, reckless of their gifts, trying to 
satisfy the craving of the immortal spirit 
with a fools' Paradise; multitudes in con- 
ventional religious life, who have no vital 
faith; who have lost the way, and need 
some one to show them the Father ; multi- 
tudes more, so pressed by the struggle of 
life that the soul seems to have dropped out ; 
the neglected on all our frontiers; those 
scattered on the mountains as sheep having 



20 Vital Elements of Preaching 

no shepherd ; the congested masses of great 
cities, who live sore lives, dumb and numb 
under their low sky ; and the peoples who do 
not know that the Sun of Righteousness has 
risen, with healing on his wings. Whom 
shall I send? And who will go for us? 
Here am I. Send me ! 

"Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer him, 
Be jubilant, my feet." 

To be a called man, to have the sense of 
the chosen of God ! This gives the worth, 
the dignity, the purpose of life. Several 
years ago, in returning from a Western vaca- 
tion, by the Great Lakes, the steamer stop- 
ping in the early evening at Detroit, I found 
myself in a square before the Russell House, 
listening to a street preacher. 

The motley throng that gathered is al- 
ways of dramatic interest, — working men 
and women, going home with their pails, 
loungers from the corners, drawn by idle 
curiosity, women of the town, and here 
and there a man, going out to dine. And 
through all indifference and interruption 
the preacher held his appointed way, with 
a purpose and a passion that did its arrest- 
ing and convincing work. 

In the midst of the sermon he stopped, 



The Called Man 21 

and began the song with the familiar refrain, 
— " Since Jesus is mine, I'm the child of a 
King." Many a time since then has the 
voice of the street preacher been God's 
word : in moments of weariness, when the 
soul shrank from the pitiful contrast be- 
tween the ideal and the actuality, and in 
moments of moral failure, when the whole 
sky of life seemed overcast, have sounded the 
brave, cheery words of the street preacher, 
"Since Jesus is mine, I'm the child of a 
King." 

We can never fail, as long as we hold fast 
to our sonship, as we have the assurance 
that we are the called of God. We can never 
be satisfied with some low, unmanly content. 
We shall never lose the spirit of the learner, 
the mind of the true prophet. It sends 
purpose, vigorous, consecrated purpose, 
through all the veins of life. 

Is the preacher's work to-day hard ? Are 
the multitudes indifferent to his voice? Is 
it a difficult and unrewarded task to be a 
true prophet? "All noble things are diffi- 
cult," was a favorite saying of Dr. Blaikie. 
"Those who have the true heroic and chiv- 
alric spirit of Christianity will not be 
repelled, but drawn by difficulties," says a 
recent British Weekly, commenting on the 



22 Vital Elements of Preaching 



career of Dr. Campbell Morgan of West- 
minster. 

"Dr. Campbell Morgan, when he had at 
his command the pulpits of the richest 
churches in England and America, delib- 
erately chose Westminster Chapel, without 
guarantee of any kind, and his example 
has heightened and brightened alike the 
ideals of ministers and of laymen.' ' 

No prophet ever lived in a more trying 
time or had a more difficult service than 
Isaiah. Yet he lives in all the growing life 
of the Kingdom of God. 



LECTURE II. THE OPEN DOOR. 

I Corinthians 16 : 9. "A great door, and effectual 
is opened unto me, and there are many adversaries." 



LECTURE II 
The Open Door 

Paul could not get by Ephesus. He had 
to stop and work. "I will tarry at Ephesus 
until Pentecost." The field irresistibly ap- 
pealed to him. It was not an easy field. 
There could not have been a harder field 
in the Roman Empire. Ephesus was the 
centre of heathen philosophies, and the 
workshop for heathen idols. Philosophy, 
religion, trade, social custom were all against 
him. But Paul was a brave man, as every 
preacher of the Gospel ought to be. He was 
stirred by danger. It challenged his man- 
hood. He knew that opposition was proof 
of the vitality of the Gospel, and the witness 
of human need. He put the door and the 
adversaries together. "A great door and 
effectual is opened unto me, and there are 
many adversaries.' ' 

Door is the simplest and boldest word for 
opportunity. The very difficulty and opposi- 
tion that Paul met made the opportunity. 
And this is my theme, that the very things 
25 



26 Vital Elements of Preaching 

that make preaching so hard to-day constitute 
the special opportunity of the preacher. 

I. What are the adversaries to our work? 
What forces are hostile to the modern pul- 
pit ? It is always dangerous to attempt the 
analysis of one's own age. It is too much 
like attempting a self-estimate. It is apt 
to be complacently laudatory, or morbidly 
critical. There are many that heckle the 
Church, that proclaim preaching a lost art, 
that turn from the pulpit to other forms of 
service ; and there are others who resent 
criticism as denial of faith, who glorify things 
as they are, who are never stirred by divine 
discontent. 

We are so much a part of our own age 
that it is hard to objectify, and get an honest 
and adequate view of it. It will be for the 
future to look at us with reason, and not 
with prejudice, and so to understand us 
fully. But some facts are so evident — 
like deep gulleys, ploughed across our plains 
by mountain freshets — that we must take 
account of them. All thoughtful men agree 
in regard to them. They seem to be ad- 
versaries to the pulpit. I use familiar terms : 
the materialistic spirit, the critical temper, 
the social unrest. 

(a) A subtle wave of materialism has 



The Open Door 27 

swept over our age, it might almost be called 
a tidal wave. It is not philosophic material- 
ism, for the thoughtful denial of the spiritual 
is rare. But it is a practical materialism, 
an absorbing interest in the things of this 
world and this life. Charles Kingsley called 
it the most sensuous age since the Northern 
tribes overran the Roman Empire. Presi- 
dent Tucker has expressed it well when he 
says: "Not only is there more of the world 
than at any previous time, but most of the 
things in the world are worth more. One 
cannot calculate by just how much the valua- 
tion of the world is increased. The moral 
effect of this increase lies in the appeal which 
the world of to-day makes to sense, rather 
than to faith. In spite of the great con- 
trasts in material condition, no one can mis- 
take the satisfaction which men take in the 
material world as they know it, as they 
possess it. With some it is a purely sordid 
gratification, the mere sensual enjoyment of 
prosperity; with others it is the satisfac- 
tion which comes from the opportunity 
of search and struggle, the hot competition 
of the business world. With others still 
it is the joy of investigation, and physical 
research, the pursuit of knowledge for the 
sake of knowledge. We cannot overestimate 



28 Vital Elements of Preaching 

the fact that the world, this physical world, 
means more to us than it ever meant to 
living men. Never before did men possess 
so many lands, or subdue so many seas. 
Never before did men know so well the 
secret of wealth. And never before have 
there been open to them so many provinces 
in the invisible realms of matter." 

As in Shakespeare's time, the sudden 
opening of the world led to an intense in- 
terest in life, as seen in the drama, so the 
conquest of earth and sky and sea, the do- 
minion of man over nature, has for the mo- 
ment dimmed the spiritual eye. At least, 
it has made the spiritual world less real and 
controlling. Life here and now is the su- 
preme good. And the stage, and the novel, 
whatever tells us of life, and gives us all its 
sensations, are effective rivals of the pulpit 
and the sermon. 

This spirit has special power in our own 
land, from the eager climate, the quickening 
commingling of races, and the new fields of 
adventure and achievement not yet closed, 
as in older lands. Take the two forms of 
the materialistic spirit — commercialism, and 
the love of pleasure. Business is the chief 
interest of our people. It affects even the 
higher phases of our life. Education has 



The Open Door 29 

changed its emphasis from the cultural value 
to the practical. A pleasant critic of our 
life has recently said : 

"The great educationist with us is often 
a great scholar. In America he is a pioneer 
in his own profession. Practical rather than 
theoretical ability is demanded in all fields." 
It has been well called "the stone age of the 
college." It is not less so in the state. The 
policy of the states is industrial and eco- 
nomic. The critical points of world-politics 
are the questions of the new fields of trade. 
And even the Church feels it. The same 
English observer says : "American preachers 
are compelled to become the engineers, 
rather than the prophets of religion." 
Churches are too apt to be judged by the 
splendour of their buildings, and the wealth 
of their pews. It was said of one of our noble 
ministers, who had done heroic work upon 
our frontiers, and in the congested centres 
of great cities, but now in middle life is the 
pastor of a prosperous people, "Our friend, 
you know, has a splendid field now. Why, 
he is the pastor of the Ivory soap men!" 
The good man who made the remark, and 
the men thus referred to, would be the first 
to repudiate such a commercial view of life, 
nevertheless unwittingly the heart spoke. 



30 Vital Elements of Preaching 

It's a straw, showing the direction of the 
current. 

"The world is too much with us. 
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers." 

And pleasure men will have at any cost. 
They ransack the earth for new delights. 
The tables of Lucullus never ministered "to 
the palate as all the zones of to-day. Old 
restraints and habits of home and worship 
and religious service are relaxed or broken. 
It is not a true optimism to ignore the fact. 
Look at the pews a pleasant Sunday morn- 
ing, and you can tell what people are owners 
of automobiles. Mr. Emerson was not much 
of a Puritan, and yet he knew the value 
of one day devoted especially to religion. 
One rainy Sunday Mrs. Emerson permitted 
the children to play battledore and shuttle- 
cock. When their father heard the noise, 
he opened the door and said : "Such a thing 
has never been known since New England 
existed, and I'm not going to have it in my 
house." We can tell how far we have come 
when the grandchildren of Emerson and 
Holmes and Lowell think nothing of play- 
ing a tennis match or ball game Sunday 
afternoon. 

My college chum recently showed me a 



The Open Door 31 

list of seventy men, all reputable business 
and professional men of a great city, willing 
to do anything for him personally, willing 
to support the Church through their wives 
and daughters, but rarely darkening the 
doors themselves. So pressed by cares, so 
feeling the killing pace of the age, that they 
demanded one day of freedom, and of play. 
I am noting facts, tendencies, but it should 
be said in passing that the tendency is not 
necessarily irreligious. It is partly a reac- 
tion from the legal strictness of Puritanism, 
and in some degree, perhaps, due to the 
widening conception of religion, regarding 
all true life as religious, and whatever will 
make a strong body and a light heart as 
essentially pleasing to God. It is certain, 
however, that the pressure of work and 
the lure of pleasure make men dull to the 
voice of the preacher. 

The critical temper of the age often seems 
a foe to the pulpit ; at least, it makes its 
work more difficult. Old creeds are dis- 
solved in many minds, and a vital faith has 
not taken definite and positive form. The 
current thought has passed into a proverb 
that it makes no difference what a man be- 
lieves if his life is only right. And even 
within the Christian society, the preacher 



32 Vital Elements of Preaching 

is not sure to meet assent to the statements 
of the most fundamental facts and truths 
of the Gospel. The preacher's word is not 
received because he is a preacher and the 
spokesman of a church. 

It is the critical attitude toward all ex- 
ternal authority, the inevitable attendant 
of the democratic movement and the scien- 
tific spirit. The lowest man has found his 
soul and asserts his right, and not seldom re- 
volts against the seeming restrictions of 
his person. Life is good, and if man were 
only free to follow his soul, the way of truth 
would be found. 

And the effort to find an orderly unity 
to the world has led to the scientific view of 
life and the doctrine of development, a new 
view of the universe, a new philosophy of 
human history. Men search for origins of 
ideas and institutions. They trace their 
growth. They are dealing with secondary 
causes, and may forget the Divine Life back 
of all, and in all. They apply the same laws 
of literary and historical criticism to our 
sacred books, and trace the development of 
our religion, and compare its ideals and claims 
with ethnic faiths. 

One cannot mistake the temper of the 
modern mind towards former conceptions 



The Open Door 33 

of religion and the worth of the pulpit. 
Literature is the surest interpretation of 
life, and it is not hard to read its spirit. We 
are greatly indebted to our essayists for 
quickened thought and purified taste, but 
they have not always been the teachers of 
faith. Carlyle hit the hollow mockeries 
of the world with his great cast-iron words, 
but he was a Calvinistic sceptic who found 
it hard to think of God in terms of personal 
will and love. Emerson was an extreme 
individualist. He had faith in his own soul 
and cared not for the past and the voices 
of other men. He was a fearless experi- 
menter. Nothing to him was sacred or 
profane. "I build to-day, to tear down 
to-morrow.' ' And to Matthew Arnold the 
old dogmatic faith had been blown away by 
the age-spirit. 

Our great poets have been men of faith, 
but the lesser voices are full of the ques- 
tioning note. One cannot forget the sensi- 
tive and sincere Arthur Hugh Clough, the 
poet " stung with Life's unrest," foiled "with 
riddles dark, and cloudy aims," or Henley, 
who can only cling to his " unconquerable 
soul," or James Thomson, in his gloomy 
temple where all the voices are dumb be- 
cause "they have no truth to tell." 



34 Vital Elements of Preaching 

Our novelists have given us beautiful 
and pathetic scenes of life and cleansing 
glimpses of the heart, but rarely have they 
been the teachers of religion. Life is a 
tragic struggle against a poor sort of Fate, 
not the discipline and unfolding of a plan 
of infinite good. To George Eliot, God was 
a sort of Brocken shadow, reflecting on a 
giant scale the hopes and fears of men. 

And this spirit of question has touched all 
sorts and conditions of men. Men who 
know little of critical theories are affected 
by the results. They draw the conclusion, 
however illogical, that if all the Bible narra- 
tives are not literally true, the Bible can be 
no word of God to them. And so it is the 
fashion of the age to take nothing on au- 
thority. In the Church and outside of it 
the temper is critical towards religious 
teaching, not one of ready and glad accept- 
ance. And so life is not so receptive of 
truth, or responsive to the ventures of 
faith. Dr. Henry van Dyke has keenly 
and wittily said that the sign of the age is 
an interrogation point, its coat of arms a 
question mark rampant, over three Bishops 
dormant ! 

And social unrest marks the civilized world, 
and has acute form in our own land. There 



The Open Door 35 

have been the rapid loosening of old ties 
and the massing of men under new condi- 
tions, many times fatal to justice and happy 
life. The personal relation in work has 
lessened through great organizations and 
absentee owners. A new patrician class 
has grown up in democracy, with all the 
power of the old, and without their sense of 
responsibility. There are gulfs between 
classes and contrasts of condition the greatest 
the world has ever seen. Dr. Gladden' s 
words are hardly extreme: "No such orgy 
of extravagant expenditure has ever greeted 
the eyes of men as that on which the world 
has been looking in Democratic America 
during the last quarter of a century. The 
workers have grown weary and bitter and 
reckless and despairing as they have watched 
this growth. In their narrow lot, in their 
struggle to keep a roof over their heads, 
and to maintain themselves and their chil- 
dren, they will go great lengths.' 7 Witness 
the frequent contests in the labour world and 
the persistent advocacy and growth of radical 
theories that would change the form of 
society. 

The spirit of organized labour is indifferent 
to the Church and often hostile to it. Labour 
leaders are rarely identified with the Church. 



36 Vital Elements of Preaching 

The meetings of labour unions are commonly 
on Sunday, and devotion to them is a sub- 
stitute for the Church. Men find in the 
labour movement the idealism that to them 
is a religion. The Christianity of the Church 
is misunderstood and often thought a foe 
to their good. A multitude of men care 
no more about the worship and service of 
the Church than about last year's weather 
reports. There are a hundred thousand 
young Jews in New York whose only heaven 
is the earthly paradise promised by Social- 
ism. Miss Jane Addams was asked to speak 
to the ministers of Chicago on the relation 
of the working man to the Church ; and she 
startled her hearers by saying that there 
was no relation. The average working man 
did not know that there was a Church. 

Are there many adversaries? Has the 
preacher fallen upon perilous times? 

II. There's an open door. There never 
was a better time to live, never a more effec- 
tual door into the real life of the world. 
And the very adversaries mark the oppor- 
tunity for the prophetic and devoted preacher. 

The conquest of the world that makes 
earthly interest so absorbing is the conquest 
of mind. Christianity that teaches the worth 
of the individual man and has so quickened 



The Open Door 37 

his power has given him the hundred arms 
for the mastery of Nature. The material 
progress and so the absorbing interest in 
the earth and the present life is the proof 
of the soul of man. And the soul will assert 
itself. There are abundant signs that the 
material levels of life are too stifling an air. 
Knowledge and power and pleasure will 
never satisfy the spirit. The very abandon 
of pleasure is the sign of the craving of the 
soul. The very restlessness of the age is 
the sign of an unsatisfied heart. "If thou 
knewest the gift of God/' might be said to 
many a life to-day as Jesus said it to the 
woman of Sychar. Money cannot heal a 
wounded conscience or cure a broken heart. 

"'There is no God/ the foolish saith, 
But none, ' There is no sorrow ' ; 
And Nature oft the cry of faith, 
In bitter need will borrow ; 
And eyes the preacher could not school, 
By wayside graves are raised ; 
And hearts cry, ' God be pitiful/ 
That ne'er said — 'God be praised.' " 

And as long as men grow weary and suffer 
they will need some one to speak to them of 
God. If we only had ears sensitive enough, 
we should hear the busy sounds of life taking 
the articulate cry, "We have lost the way; 
show us the Father and it sufnceth us." 



38 Vital Elements of Preaching 

Then look at the witness of denial. The 
very substitutes which men have tried to 
put in the place of Christianity are the im- 
perative call of the religious nature. They 
are proofs of the vitality of faith. 

We cannot know God, men say. On 
every side of us is the sensible and material 
through which the mind cannot penetrate 
in its search for truth. God may be back 
of it all or through all, but we cannot know. 
Our knowledge comes through the senses. 
But if we must be agnostic, we are not 
irreligious. We can still keep the attitude 
of worship. We can reverence and bow down 
before the mystery of the Unknown. 

Again men say — faith has been swept 
away by science, but we have the flower 
and fruit of religion. The ethical attain- 
ment, the graces of character, the social 
ideals that we have inherited from Chris- 
tianity — these are the permanent posses- 
sion of the race. We still have religion, but 
it must be ethical. We still cherish the 
spirit of love and purity and trust. 

And once more, we cannot have God or 
mystery, but we have man. He is ever 
growing. We have not arrived. There is in 
the great stream of life that which makes 
for the higher life. Shall we not worship 



The Open Door 39 

man — at least the noblest man ? Hero- 
worship is the unconscious tribute to the 
divine in man. The religion of humanity is 
the worship of the highest human ideals. 

So the very substitutes for faith prove 
the vitality of the soul. 

Men are never happy in denial. They 
find no peace in it. Who can forget the 
anguish of many a heart at the thought "the 
great companion is dead." Is there any- 
thing more pathetic than the literature of 
denial? You are familiar with Matthew 
Arnold's "Dover Beach" — in which the 
infinite pathos of a faithless world has its 
finest and sincerest expression. 

"The sea is calm to-night. 
The tide is full, the moon lies fair 

Upon the straits : — on the French coast the light 

Gleams and is gone. The cliffs of England stand, 

Glimmering and vast out in the tranquil bay. 
Come to the window, sweet is the night air ! 

Only, from the long line of spray 

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land, 

Listen ! — You hear the grating roar 
Of pebbles which the waves draw back and fling, 

At their return, up the high strand, 
Begin, and cease, and then again begin, 

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring 

The eternal note of sadness in. 

Sophocles long ago 

Heard it on the iEgean, and it brought 



40 Vital Elements of Preaching 

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow 

Of human misery ; we 

Find also in the sound a thought, 
Hearing it by this distant Northern sea. 

The sea of faith 
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore 

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd. 

But now I only hear 

Its' melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, 

Retreating to the breath 
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear 

And naked shingles of the world. 

Ah, love, let us be true 
To one another ! for the world, which seems 
To lie before us like a land of dreams, 
So various, so beautiful, so new, 
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, 
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain ; 
And we are here as on a darkling plain 
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, 
Where ignorant armies clash by night." 

And the social unrest tells the same story. 
It is proof of the vitality of the spirit of man. 
It is the aspiration and struggle for a better 
life. Professor Peabody remarks that the 
contests of labour are the mark of a free and 
civilized society, that there are no labour 
troubles in Turkey. That was true when 
he wrote, for there was no freedom then. 
But the week after the new constitution 
was promulgated there was a strike on the 
street cars of Constantinople. 



The Open Door 41 

Workmen are not insensible to the reli- 
gious appeal. Too much must not be in- 
ferred from their hissing the Church yet 
cheering the name of Jesus, but it shows 
that they are not sunk below enthusiasm 
for an ideal — and that means much. 

During the railroad riots of '79, when an 
infuriated mob of strikers threatened to 
sweep up Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, and burn 
the homes of the rich, General Devereux, 
the president of one of the roads involved, 
went to the shops and finally got the ear of 
the men to speak to them. What should 
he say? Finally, without premeditation, 
he began to tell the story of Jesus, his life 
of patient kindness and well-doing, his 
interest in every life, his understanding and 
sympathy, his love of the poor, and toiling, 
and suffering, the love that gave his very life 
for men. 

As the simple story proceeded, the hard 
lines gradually faded from the faces of the 
men, the fierce passions cooled, and some- 
thing of the peace of Christ came into their 
hearts; the men recognized the ties of hu- 
manity and the danger was past. I do not 
say that this is faith, but it is the capacity 
of faith, and whenever the Son of Man is 
presented in his divine reality, the hearts 



42 Vital Elements of Preaching 

of men will respond to it. Many adversaries, 
and a great and effectual door ! 

When Dr. Thomas Guthrie had left the 
beautiful parish of Arbilot on the North 
Sea for the new parish of St. John's, Edin- 
burgh, cut out of the Cowgate, the poorest 
and most neglected part of the city, he was 
standing one day on George IV Bridge, the 
street that spans the Cowgate, looking down 
upon the narrow, filthy closes, filled with 
their noisome brood, and longing, with a 
heavy heart, for the green fields and kind 
friends he had left, when he felt a heavy 
hand on his shoulder and heard the deep, 
gruff voice of Dr. Chalmers say, as with 
the other hand he swept a wide gesture over 
the parish, "A magnificent field of opera- 
tions, sir, — a magnificent field of opera- 
tions !" 

This is what every brave soul must say 
of the age in which we live. "Talk about 
the time for the preacher and the Church 
being gone ! There never was a time when 
both were more needed. It is an anxious 
time, a time of great problems, a time of 
radical changes, a time of testing and suf- 
fering. But we may live through it all, 
and keep heart and courage up, and abide 
in our place, and do our work, and stand in 



The Open Door 43 

our lot to the end of the days if only we have 
faith and the vision and judgment which come 
from faith." (British Weekly, Sept. 14, 1911.) 

A great door and effectual is opened unto 
us, and the very adversaries are the witness 
to the need of the soul and the vitality of our 
Gospel. 

III. Who can enter the door? Who can 
make the largest use of opportunity? The 
man of sympathy — the man who can feel 
with us the difficulties of faith, who is free 
from all superiority and disdain and cen- 
sorious spirit, the man who feels as his own 
loss the tragic failure of men to realize their 
sonship, whose heart is filled with a great 
compassion at the ignorance and wayward- 
ness of men, the man who loves until he 
gives. Every man should long to have as 
his own characteristic the inscription on the 
statue of Phillips Brooks, "the preacher of 
the word of God and the friend of man." 

The man of magnanimity, — the large- 
mindedness in thought and feeling that 
shall recognize the common things of life, 
but not be limited by them, that shall pass 
over all petty barriers that the pride and 
selfishness of men are forever raising, and 
shall forever deal with truth and life in the 
largest way. 



44 Vital Elements of Preaching 

Large-mindedness is the opposite of that 
narrow selfishness that regards all persons 
and events and truths as they affect one's 
self — that provincialism of the pulpit. It 
is the recognition of truth and sincerity 
in the men who do not follow us, the power 
to interpret the half-truth in error and reveal 
the God whom men ignorantly worship, 
to see through the seeming confusion of 
moral things the order that God is working 
out, to lay hold of the essential, universal 
truths of Christianity, to refuse to deal with 
any petty side lights, any eccentric "isms," 
so that men shall feel their kinship with God 
and with one another. 

Edward Thring, the great schoolmaster 
of Uppingham, defined moral greatness as 
the "power to move among common things 
with a sense of their divineness." The 
narrow mind is apt to be the closed mind. 
It may lose the power to see by refusing to 
lift the eyes beyond the routine of the day's 
work. A man may be in the heart of a 
great empire, just awakening to its unity 
and power, fairly seething with the forces 
of new intellectual and spiritual life, calling 
for leadership, — and yet be blind to all 
this and helpless before these unloosed eth- 
nic powers. 



The Open Door 45 

There is special call for the large-minded 
minister in our land to-day. Only such a 
man can harmonize conflicting views of 
truth. Only such a man can lift men out 
of petty individualism into the cooperation 
of an organic life. Only such a man can 
understand the meaning of the peoples 
gathered here, what the thoughtless and 
worldly mind calls "the scum of the earth," 
and use those patient and sympathetic pro- 
cesses of spiritual training that shall yet 
develop the highest expression of Christian 
life. 

The man of faith, — to whom God is the 
great reality and his will in Christ supreme, 
who feels the certainty of his word and the 
perfect fitness of that word to the deepest 
need of men, who knows the relation of the 
simplest duty to the final victory of the king- 
dom, whose eye is daily lightened by that 
shining goal. 

The man of courage, whose spirit rises 
with danger, who is not deterred by diffi- 
culty, who is willing to face odds, who plays 
a man's part, who endures and hopes to the 
end, who believes in the eternal years of 
God. 

To such a man the age is an open door — 
the difficulties and emergencies of life a divine 



46 Vital Elements of Preaching 

opportunity. The late Mr. E. R. Sill has 
pictured such a man in " Opportunity. " 

" This I beheld, or dreamed it in a dream : — 

There spread a cloud of dust along a plain ; 

And underneath the cloud, or in it, raged 

A furious battle, and men yelled, and swords 

Shocked upon swords and shields. A prince's banner 

Wavered, then staggered backward, hemmed by foes. 

A craven hung along the battle's edge, 

And thought, ' Had I a sword of keener steel — 

That blue blade that the King's son bears — but this 

Blunt thing ! ' — he snapt and flung it from his hand, 

And lowering crept away and left the field. 

Then came the King's son, wounded, sore bestead, 

And weaponless, and saw the broken sword, 

Hilt-buried in the dry and trodden sand, 

And ran and snatched it, and with battle-shout 

Lifted afresh, he hewed his enemy down, 

And saved a great cause that heroic day." 



LECTURE III. THE VISION OF MAN 

John 4: 35. "Lift up your eyes, and look on the 
fields, that they are white already unto harvest." 



>v 



LECTURE III 

The Vision of Man 

Men are ranked by their vision. In a 
very real sense the vision makes the man. 
It gives him his reach and his power. One 
man sees nothing new in the materials of life 
and work, and he becomes one of the world's 
drones, or one of the world's blind drudges. 
Another man sees an engine in the kettle, 
a new language in the clouds, an angel in 
the marble, a hero in the child, a people in 
the multitude ; and he becomes an inventor, 
an artist, a prophet, a statesman. 

One man keeps his eye on the ground. 
He is a realist. He takes things as they are. 
He believes in the actual and the practical. 
He rarely looks beyond his day or his spot 
of earth. He is a comfortable or restless 
mole, with no eyes beyond his little burrow. 
Another man lifts up his eyes. The ladder 
of his life does not lie flat upon the ground, 
but, as in Jacob's vision, it is raised to heaven, 
and there are angels of God ascending and 
descending upon it. He believes in the ideal, 
e 49 



50 Vital Elements of Preaching 

the possible man, and he labors to make the 
ideal the actual. 

No man does anything worth doing who 
has not first some vision of it. It is first 
simply an idea of his mind, a desire of his 
heart, a bright vision before his eyes. "See 
that thou make all things according to the 
pattern showed thee in the mountain," is 
the divine law for building character or any 
worthy temple of achievement. "All that 
God does is in prosecution of a plan, an eter- 
nal idea come to utterance." Nothing can 
be built without a plan — that is, an ideal. 
The boy who did not know what he was 
making by his whittling was not engaged by 
the master. The longer the plan, the larger 
the life. That is not worth doing that can 
be done in a brief day. 

And the ideal not only directs the aim and 
the energy of life, but it is the great dis- 
coverer and quickener of man's nature. 
He is more and does more because he reaches 
out beyond the present and the actual. 

"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, 
Or what's a heaven for ? " 

The same influence is upon preaching. 
The pulpit is often divided between the 
realists and the idealists. One preacher is 



The Vision of Man 51 

under the power of the actual, the visible, 
the local. He regards men as they seem. 
He knows all the local gossip about the men 
and women of his parish. He comes to 
dwell upon the littleness and the weakness 
of men. He does not believe them capable 
of any large life and does not expect it. He 
does not lift them up, call them into the 
realm of nobleness and magnanimity, into 
the larger life of the race, into the new man 
of spiritual progress. He does not live 
there himself, and how can he help men to 
live there ? 

"I am contemplating another move, since 
there seems to be little chance of develop- 
ment here. Though I have been here but 
eighteen months, it has been long enough to 
test myself in this rural field. We have 
fitted in all right, and everything is pleasant 
as regards our relation to the community, 
but the work does not move except in an old 
and deep rut. About all I can do here is to 
keep a garden, raise chickens, pitch hay 
occasionally for the neighbours, eat big din- 
ners, and preach every Sunday when it does 
not rain. I do not feel that this is all there 
is for me to do." 

Another man who went to a similar field 
found that there were forty-three families of 



52 Vital Elements of Preaching 

Protestant antecedents within three or four 
miles of the Church, who never, save in the 
case of funerals, set eyes within the Church. 
I wonder if these two men are examples of 
what Charles Kingsley has expressed in his 
lecture on "Mr. Eyes and Mr. No-eyes"? 

Another preacher has spiritual eyes. He 
looks beneath the surface view of life, into 
its heart. He knows that man was made 
for God and is restless until he finds God. 
He knows that Christ was made in accord- 
ance with the power of an endless life, and 
therefore you cannot put any narrow, earthly 
limits to what man may become. This is 
the vision of the spiritual preacher. 

It is Christ's vision of man. It has strik- 
ing illustration in the passage from which I 
have chosen a text for the lecture. A crowd 
of Samaritans were coming out of Sychar, 
attracted by the word of the woman — 
"Come, see a man who told me all things 
that ever I did." They were drawn together 
by curiosity as any crowd of men might be 
anywhere in the world. We would not 
think them very interesting or very promis- 
ing. The disciples did not think them so. 
They were not a pure race, — half Jew, half 
Canaanite ; their religion was as impure as 
their blood ; they were low down in the 



The Vision of Man 53 

social and moral scale. You could not 
expect any good thing from them. They 
were a dry and unpromising field. Christ 
did not think so. He saw men as they 
really were. He knew what was in man. 
And he says to the dull-eyed disciples ; 
"Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields 
that they are white already to harvest.' ' 

And this was always the mind of Christ. 
His eye was single and so it was full of light. 
He saw things whole and he saw things 
clear. He looked through all the disguises 
and wrappings of life, all the artificial barriers 
that hide and divide men, and saw the real 
man, the essential man, man as a living soul, 
a child of God. 

An hour before this, he had met the woman 
at Jacob's well. She was ignorant, super- 
stitious, degraded. We should be tempted 
to withdraw from her as from contagion. 
A modern congregation might feel uncomfort- 
able if she came in to worship. What could 
she know of God ? What could she have to 
do with the pure and holy Jesus? Surely, 
she was too low down in the scale ! And 
yet, notice how Christ dealt with her ! What 
courtesy, what kindness, what understand- 
ing ! Well might Charles Lamb call Jesus 
"the first gentleman." No selfish attitude 



54 Vital Elements of Preaching 

of superiority to her, no haughty condescen- 
sion, no speaking down to her ! He recog- 
nized her spiritual nature, the secret need 
and craving of her heart. He tried to awaken 
it and then to satisfy it. To this ignorant, 
superstitious, degraded woman he spoke, 
as though it were hers by right as well as 
his, the loftiest truth He ever spoke to man, 
the spiritual nature of God and of all true 
worship of God. 

And so it was with Christ always. He was 
a revealer of life. He spoke to the best in 
man and called it forth. He saw in Peter 
and John, the rough, untutored fishermen, 
the open-mindedness and loyalty and cour- 
age of great apostles. He saw in the sinful 
woman who washed his feet with tears of 
penitence and wiped them with her hair, 
not the outcast, but the soul, washed of its 
sin, capable of great love and sacrifice. He 
saw in Levi, the despised tax-gatherer, 
that poverty of spirit, that hunger after a 
better life, that would make him a true dis- 
ciple and the writer of the first Gospel. He 
saw in Saul, the conscientious Pharisee, the 
religious zealot, the capacity for profound 
conviction and sustained enthusiasm and 
unwearied labor that made him the mis- 
sionary Apostle. 



The Vision of Man 55 

The early Church had much of the idealism 
of Christ. It was the vision of the white 
harvest fields of human life that scattered 
the early disciples everywhere preaching 
the word, and in a single generation made 
men messengers of the Christ from the pillars 
of Hercules to the gates of India. 

Paul, in his missionary journeyings, had 
come to the western limits of Asia. If the 
day were clear, he could look across the 
iEgean and see the dim outline of a new 
continent. He was ambitious to conquer 
new lands and he went to sleep with that 
hope in his heart, and he had a dream that 
changed the face of Europe, and made pos- 
sible a Christian civilization beyond the sea. 
A man of Macedonia stood before him with 
that cry which has been the watchword of 
Christian advance ever since. "Come over 
and help us." 

To Paul man was the greatest word next 
to God. He was not thinking of men as 
they were. Macedonia did not know of his 
gospel and did not care. No committee 
from Macedonia with urgent appeal called 
for the service of Paul. Then, as now, men 
were indifferent to their high calling, or 
ignorant of it. God sent the vision and not 
man — but it was the vision of man. It was 



56 Vital Elements of Preaching 

man as God saw him — his need and his 
hope that made Paul the great optimist and 
the master-missionary. 

You have but to study the word saints in 
the Epistles to know the magnanimity of the 
Apostles, their faith in goodness, their vision 
of the possible man. Take the church at 
Corinth. It was formed from the most cor- 
rupt city of the world. They were im- 
perfect in their faith and still more in 
their life. None of them were as good as 
they ought to be. Read the letters of Paul 
to see how factious and selfish, worldly and 
even sensual, many of them were. And yet 
Paul calls them saints; he looks through 
their stained and crippled lives and sees the 
men that are to be. He believes that Christ 
can make — is making — new men of them. 
Paul was a Christian idealist — and so an 
optimist. The vision of the possible man 
has quickened the blood of every true op- 
timist. 

Long after, Tennyson prays : 

"0, for a man to arise in me, 
That the man that I am may cease to be ! " 

and the Gospel is the answer that God gives 
to every one with this longing. 

Paul's faith in men is something wonder- 



The Vision of Man 57 

ful because he knew what Christ had done 
for him, and he believed in the living Christ. 
I suppose the Roman Christians were in no 
sense a superior body. And yet, with what 
appreciation and confidence Paul writes 
to them! "I am persuaded of you, my 
brethren, that ye yourselves are full of good- 
ness, filled with all knowledge, able also to 
admonish one another " (Rom. 15 : 14). 

It is the vision of the soul of man, its 
worth, its need, its redemption, that has writ- 
ten the best chapters of the Church, the 
story of loving and self-denying service in 
many lands, of heroic devotion to the spir- 
itual good of the nations. And modern 
missions has been led by the same vision. 
For the first time, something of the greatness 
of Christ's thought has been seen. Men 
begin to have the mind of Christ in his view 
of the world. Man is thought of as man- 
kind. The differences of race and land and 
tongue are superficial. The oneness of man- 
kind is essential and vital. Christianity is 
a world religion, or it is only an imposture, 
it is for all men or it can be nothing for any 
man. In this vision and hope the finest 
men and women of our time have labored. 
They see the future in the instant, the white 
harvest fields where life is the poorest and 



58 Vital Elements of Preaching 

most forbidding. They find joy in the 
hardest sowing of the seed. 

Take life as we shall find it, as we have 
found it, — men and women of common 
clay, absorbed in very earthly pursuits, 
seemingly far more interested in work and 
play than they are in our message ; many 
vulgar and petty and disagreeable; many 
slaves of sin in gross or refined forms ; many 
whose studies and pursuits have led them to 
consider the Gospel a far-away tale; who 
have no use for what they term the " stage 
properties" of the other world, who are 
supremely interested in the affairs of this 
life; some who would write themselves 
" lovers of their fellow-men" who seem un- 
certain even of the fact of God. Shall we 
take these people at their own estimate? 
Or shall we look at them with deeper eyes, 
the mind of Christ ? 

The pulpit is powerfully influenced by its 
own time. We are all greatly tempted to 
look at life through the atmosphere of com- 
mon opinion. We are not above the social 
prejudice that separates classes and races 
and blinds the eye to the possible good. We 
have bowed down to the idols of the market- 
place and the forum. Take the different 
peoples that confront our Christianity and 



The Vision of Man 59 

make the practical race problem for our 
churches. The dull-eyed world says, " There 
is no good Indian but a dead Indian, " but 
Dr. Riggs, who laboured for forty years among 
the Sioux, and whose "Mary and I" is the 
very idyll of beautiful life, said, "I went to 
my work thinking of the Indian as an Indian, 
but I soon came to think of him as a man." 
The dull-eyed world says, "The negro is a 
brute, fit only for the servile work of the 
world"; but the vision of Christ speaks 
through thousands of great-hearted lives : 
"Give the man a chance, whom your own 
civilization has kept a brute. The soul of 
the black man is as precious in the sight of 
God as the soul of the white." 

The dull-eyed world says, "He is only a 
Sheeny," and the lip curls in scorn at the 
word. And we may regard the most vital 
and religious race of the world as hopeless. 
The race prejudice of our American Chris- 
tianity is as irrational and pagan and despi- 
cable as the castes of India. 

The dull-eyed world speaks of the China- 
man as a "yellow peril." "He never can 
become a true Christian." But the vision of 
Christ speaking through that noble states- 
man, Mr. John Hay, and the most prophetic 
men of the church says : "The Chinaman has 



60 Vital Elements of Preaching 

intellectual and spiritual capacity of the high- 
est order. We shall yet see in the East the 
highest development of Christianity." The 
dull-eyed world says: "He is only a Dago. 
He may do our dirty work, he may dig our 
sewers and pave our streets, but he never 
can become one of us. He is a menace to 
our society by his low standards of living." 
But the mind of Christ says: "He is the 
countryman of Dante and Petrarch, of 
Raphael and Angelo, of Verdi and Salvini, of 
Cavour and Mazzini and Garibaldi. He still 
has the soul of music and art, of liberty and 
religion. It is our work to touch that soul 
and make it live again." 

One of our young poets, Robert Haven 
Schauffler, the grandson of the famous 
missionary of Constantinople, and son of 
the missionary to the Bohemians, has taught 
our eyes to see aright the polyglot peoples 
that have flocked to our shores: 

"Countrymen, bend and invoke 
Mercy for us blasphemers, 
For that we spat on these marvellous folk, 
Nations of darers and dreamers, 
Scions of singers and seers, 
Our peers and more than our peers. 
'Rabble and refuse/ we name them 
And ' scum of the earth ' to shame them. 
Mercy for us of the few, young years, 



The Vision of Man 61 

Of the culture so callow and crude, 

Of the hands so grasping and rude, 

The lips so ready for sneers 

At the sons of our ancient more-than-peers. 

Mercy for us who dare despise 

Men in whose loins our Homer lies ; 

Mothers of men who shall bring to us 

The glory of Titian, the grandeur of Huss ; 

Children, in whose frail arms shall rest 

Prophets and singers and saints of the West. 

" Newcomers all from the Eastern seas, 
Help us incarnate dreams like these. 
Forget, and forgive, that we did you wrong. 
Help us to father a nation, strong 
In the comradeship of an equal birth, 
In the wealth of the richest bloods of earth." 

How many a country parish, that may 
seem common and unattractive, is full of 
interesting and promising life, if we only 
had the eyes to see it. I have passed the 
summer in a small hill town of Massachusetts 
where for a hundred years Marget Howe 
and William McClure, and Domsie and 
Drumsleigh and many more like them could 
be found. I am sure that the narrow little 
hamlet of Drumtochty never had finer 
characters than many a country community 
of New England. Only you must have the 
big heart and vivid imagination of an Ian 
Maclaren to bring them out. 



62 Vital Elements of Preaching 

The true story of Dr. Watson's ministry 
is found in his Scottish sketches. He never 
forgot the people of the glen, or the great 
lesson of his earlier ministry — that noble 
lives were often found in hard conditions 
and behind rough faces. How beautiful 
his answer to the Highland parish on the 
25th anniversary of his ordination ! 

" Nothing could be more encouraging to 
a minister than to know that after the lapse 
of a quarter of a century his ordination day 
is still remembered in the glen where he began 
his work. From a great city and from very 
different scenes my thoughts turn with 
fondness to the slope of the Grampians and 
the parish which was then so much secluded 
from the outer world, and where on that 
account the hearts were so true and deep. 
When wearied by the din of the city and hard- 
driven by its many demands, I often wish 
that I were again in the Manse garden, or 
by the side of the Almond, or on the hill 
below the quarry where the wind is blowing 
free and clear, or in the little Kirk with the 
familiar faces of the past, old and young, 
looking at me. . . . Oh, the days that have 
been, and shall be no more, but love re- 
maineth." 

Take the rude, wild life of our frontiers, 



The Vision of Man 63 

where the elemental passions of men seem 
to rage at times in their wildest fury. "The 
frontiers of civilization," said Henry Ward 
Beecher, "are the fringes of hell." But 
a Sky Pilot sees behind these rough faces 
and hard conditions the capacity for pure 
feeling and heroic devotion, and in that 
vision he preaches the Christ without whom 
none of us can live the life of men. 

Or take the more hopeless and sodden mass 
of some great city. Mr. Huxley was of the 
opinion that the savages of Patagonia were 
in a better state than many in London's 
East End. You can go in ten minutes from 
your stately churches to where sin has 
stripped off all the garments of beauty and 
appears in her hideous and repulsive de- 
formity. People are crowded together in 
unwholesome conditions where a decent fam- 
ily life seems impossible. "Worse housed 
than our hacks and our pointers." They 
cannot earn the wages of a decent living. 
They labour sore and die without thought 
and without hope. Is it an unpleasant sight ? 
Do men turn away from the hopeless prob- 
lem? "I always shut my eyes," said a soci- 
ety woman, "when I have to go down Third 
Avenue Elevated." 

There are men and women — like Jacob 



64 Vital Elements of Preaching 

Riis and Miss Jane Addams and Dr. Graham 
Taylor — and a growing number of them, 
who look through the eyes of Christ with his 
divine pity for the multitudes and his hope 
also. There are men who have the faith 
that 

"Beneath the veriest ash, there hides a spark of soul, 
Which quickened by love's breath may yet pervade 

the whole 
0' the gray." 

This faith in the spiritual capacity of men 
is necessary for the most effective preaching 
to them. The most fatal unbelief is not 
criticism of certain views of the Bible or 
denial of the authority of venerable creeds, 
but loss of faith in the power of the Gospel 
to make a new life, and loss of faith in the 
capacity of men to respond to that life. You 
cannot help a man unless you have faith 
in his power to become a good man. This 
surely is one element in the divine forgive- 
ness. God says to us that confidence is now 
restored and we can become worthy of his 
love. A Christian optimism is essential 
to all leadership. "Why do you judge life 
by its worst phases and faith by its low- water 
mark of depression? " said the late David 
Swing to one of our young ministers in 



The Vision of Man 65 

Chicago. "If I lose faith in men one hour 
in twenty-four, in the twenty-three hours 
of faith I will do my work for humanity." 

What are the helps for the preacher tow- 
ards this spiritual vision of man ? 

To bring our lives daily and rigorously 
under the mind of Christ, to seek more 
earnestly than we can express to have his 
view of life and work. We must carry the 
atmosphere of prayer and fellowship with 
us, or our vision will certainly be coloured by 
the atmosphere of the world. If we do not 
make Christ supreme, we shall bow before 
the idols of the market and the forum. 

It is a help to cultivate the spiritual 
imagination, that interpretative power of life, 
to fill the mind with fair visions, to grow in 
magnanimity, to dwell in thought constantly 
upon the true and beautiful and good. A 
prosy, lifeless minister is apt to be a blind 
minister, and one is the cause of the other. 
Not to dwell on the ideal side — ever to 
remember that God has sent us and that 
God will help us — is to be false spies and 
cowardly leaders, who have no place in the 
promised land. And whatever will purify 
the vision and give us the divine impulses 
that attend it will help the preacher to in- 
terpret truth and life in the light of the largest 



66 Vital Elements of Preaching 

hope. That is why ministers, of all men, 
should cultivate the imagination. That is 
why Lord Bacon urged the study of poetry — 
as the training of the eye to see and the heart 
to feel more than the common man. " Poesy 
was ever thought to have some participation 
of divineness because it doth raise and erect 
the mind, by submitting the shews of things 
to the desires of the mind." 

It is also a help to have large interests, to 
get out of the local and provincial, and, in 
our studies and sympathies, get into the deep 
currents of the race. We not only need to 
write individuals on our hearts, but also 
humanity, to connect each one with the larger 
idea. That each one, however weak, is 
a part of that race that shall move on to the 
perfected kingdom of God. 

A young minister expressed his joy in an 
exchange of pulpits with a neighbouring 
minister. It helped him to forget the petti- 
ness and littleness of a too close and narrow 
view of men and rise to that truer, ideal view 
of a congregation, that " impression of preach- 
ing to humanity, and so to keep the truth 
that he preaches as large as it ought to be." 
Phillips Brooks calls looking across the face 
of a congregation like looking the race in 
the future. "All the nobleness and re- 
sponsibility of his vocation comes to him." 



The Vision of Man 67 

And there is no help for the spiritual vision 
like the determined purpose to seek men. 
We lose faith in men because we don't love 
them enough. We don't yearn for their 
salvation. How startled many preachers 
would be when they come down from their 
finished pulpits to hear some man utter the 
cry of the Philippian jailor ! Every faithful 
effort to win men will lay bare their spirit- 
ual nature and worth. Faithless, visionless 
preaching comes from moral indifference. 
The preacher whose heart is stirred, who is 
intent on the salvation of men, has a vision 
of what the soul is worth. "It is by working 
for the soul that we best learn what the soul 
is worth. If ever in your ministry the souls 
of those committed to your care grow dull 
before you, and you doubt whether they have 
any such value that you should give your 
life for them, go out and work for them, 
and as you work their value shall grow clear 
to you. Go and try to save a soul and you 
will see how well it is worth saving, how 
capable it is of the most complete salvation. 
Not by pondering upon it, nor by talking of 
it, but by serving it, you learn its precious- 
ness." (Brooks.) 



LECTURE IV. THE SECRET OF THE 
HEART 

John 4 : 10. "If thou knewest the gift of God, and 
who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink." 



LECTURE IV 

The Secret of the Heart 

1. There are preachers who stand out 
as great interpreters of truth, and there are 
others who are felt to be great interpreters 
of life. Liddon and Alexander Maclaren are 
of the first class; Robertson and Spurgeon, 
Beecher and Brooks, of the second. Canon 
Liddon was a critical student of the Scriptures. 
For twenty-five years he had the chair of 
New Testament Exegesis at Oxford. At the 
same time he was a master of philosophical 
thinking, especially as it touches the forms 
of Gospel truth. And he made all this ex- 
perience and culture vocal in his preaching. 
He was intent on clear thinking, he took his 
hearers through processes of scripture in- 
duction. With his wealth of critical and 
philosophical knowledge he unfolded the 
truths of Scripture over against what he held 
to be the erroneous thinking of the day. 
The supreme work of Alexander Maclaren 
was to master and teach the Scriptures. 
He was a lifelong student of the Bible. No 
71 



72 Vital Elements of Preaching 

modern preacher has so honoured its pages. 
Almost no modern sermons are so scriptural 
in care for the exact truth of the writer, in 
the use of the Scripture for both illustration 
and argument, and in bringing the very- 
atmosphere of the Gospel into the pulpit. 
He had such faith in the divineness of the 
message that he was intent only on interpret- 
ing the Scripture, certain that it would prove 
its own fitness to the human heart. 

He was the spiritual teacher, tracing in the 
Scriptures and in the experiences of the dis- 
ciple the truths of the "new man." It 
would be difficult to find in modern sermons 
more systematic teaching of the sources of 
life, the beginning, the steps of growth, the 
duties and traits of the spiritual man. 
And, as corresponding to these, as their 
source and divine means, the careful and 
systematic unfolding of the truths of the 
Gospel. " Faith saves by getting a living 
hold of the Christ who saves. The object 
of faith is not a creed, but a person. The 
work of the creeds is simply to make him 
known. The Christ is not simply example 
and teacher, but the crucified and risen Lord, 
the atoning Saviour, and the glorified head 
of a redeemed race." Alexander Maclaren 
combined the interpretation of the word of 



The Secret of the Heart 73 

God and the analysis of human experience 
in that life. So he attained to something 
like a science of the spiritual life, a practical 
philosophy of the Gospel. 

F. W. Robertson knew his Bible, but he 
knew man and his own heart still better. 
He had a subtle power of penetrating to the 
very heart of the human secret. Like the 
finest literature, his sermons deal with the 
drama of the inner life. Spurgeon also 
knew what was in man. He did not come to 
it like Robertson through his imagination, 
but by his sturdy common sense, his genial 
sympathy, and his large experience of the 
average man. 

Beecher was a student of literature and 
life, all that would help him to sympathy 
with men and the understanding of their 
natures. Like a great harp, his heart vibrates 
to every human touch. He always deals 
with the elemental passions and aims to 
speak so as to touch the motives of action. 

Phillips Brooks was prophetic in his effort 
to teach the essentialness of Gospel truth, 
and still more in his subtle understanding 
of the human heart. His sermons, like 
Tennyson's poems, search the age-conscious- 
ness to its lowest depth. The heart is laid 
bare with startling truthfulness, its secret 



74 Vital Elements of Preaching 

motives and loves, the complex working out 
in action and character. 

2. The Bible is the book of life. Its 
truth is always through life and for life. In 
its historic revelation, it gives the deepest 
experiences of the race in religion. The arc 
is long enough to know the meaning of action. 
Real men and women live in its pages. We 
trace the origin and growth and fruit of good 
and evil. All the play of motive is here. 
It is a mirror in which we see ourselves. The 
writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews speaks 
of the Word of God as " living and active 
and sharper than any two-edged sword, 
and piercing even to the dividing of soul 
and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and 
quick to discern the thoughts and intents 
of the heart.' ' And the teacher who really 
interprets the Bible, who regards it as some- 
thing more real than a treasury of proof- 
texts for his doctrine, will hold this mirror 
up to Nature. No man can be a true 
interpreter of Scripture without revealing 
the heart of man. 

3. But there is a definite and specific 
use of the Scriptures for unveiling the inner 
life and there are preachers who are essen- 
tially interpreters and revealers. 

4. It is evident, I think, that this inter- 



The Secret of the Heart 75 

pretation of life is a large office of the pulpit. 
We must get beneath the surface of life, 
behind the conventions of society, back of 
the maxims and standards of popular thought. 
We must understand and reveal man the 
individual, and man as a part of humanity. 

Men are not what they seem. There is 
a nobler and baser man too. The forces of 
convention and of habit, of association and 
of opinion, hide the real heart. The worst 
of it is that they are able to hide the heart 
from itself. Men so live in self-comparison, 
in the estimate of others, in the sunshine of 
popular favor and worldly success that they 
live in the surface of their lives. They may 
live thirty, fifty, seventy years without look- 
ing deep enough to know what sort of men 
they really are. Life can never be real. 
There can never be any spiritual growth 
without a deep revealing. 

There are secret longings half felt and never 
voiced. There are men and women who 
seem untouched by the ministry of the 
Church, indifferent to her voice, the soul dead 
in them or never born, who are restless and dis- 
satisfied — the soul of man shown even in 
its ruins, to use the thought of Bushnell. 

"Here, within the soul's gloomy chamber, 
the loosened passions rage and chafe, im- 



76 Vital Elements of Preaching 

patient of their law ; here huddle on the wild 
and desultory thoughts; here the imagina- 
tion crowds in shapes of glory and disgust, 
tokens both and mockeries of its own creative 
power, no longer in the keeping of reason ; 
here sits remorse, scowling and biting her 
chain ; here creep out the fears, a meagre 
and pale multitude ; here drives on the will 
in his chariot of war; here lie trampled the 
great aspirations, groaning in immortal thirst ; 
. . . and yet, despite all this, a fact which 
overtops and crowns all other evidence, you 
are trying and contriving still to be happy, a 
happy ruin ! Oh this great and mighty soul, 
were it something else you might find what 
to do with it ; — charm it with the jingles 
of a golden toy, house it in a safe with ledgers 
and stocks, take it about on journeys to see 
and to be seen. Anything would please it 
and bring it content. But it is the godlike 
soul, capable of rest in nothing but God, 
able to be filled and satisfied with nothing 
but his fulness and the confidence of his 
friendship." 

And Browning has voiced the spirit-life 
of man in his baseness — (Christina) : 

"Oh, we're sunk enough here, God knows ! 
But not quite so sunk that moments 
Sure though seldom are denied us, 



The Secret of the Heart 77 

When the spirit's true endowments 
Stand out plainly from its false ones, 
And apprising it if pursuing 
Or the right way or the wrong way, 
To its triumph or undoing. 



"There are flashes struck from midnights, 
There are fire-names noondays kindle, 
Whereby piled up honours perish, 
Whereby swollen ambitions dwindle, 
While just this or that poor impulse 
Which for once had play unstifled 
Seems the sole work of a lifetime 
That away the rest have trifled." 

To make men conscious of the secret 
processes of their lives, to fathom for them 
the depths of their unbelief and godlessness, 
to make them see and feel the power of sinful 
desire in their hearts that pulls them down 
and turns the fairest promise into earthliness, 
as the earthworm pulls in the leaf, this is 
the first work of the Spirit, and the first work 
of the preacher through the agency of the 
Spirit. "And he, when he is come, will 
convict the world in respect of sin, and of 
righteousness, and of judgment " (John 
16:8). 

There is no better example of this revealing 
the secrets of the heart than in the chapter 
by J. G. Holland on "the Vices of The Imag- 



78 Vital Elements of Preaching 

ination" in "Gold Foil." "We often wonder 
that certain men and women are left by God 
to the commission of sins which shock us. 
We wonder how, under the temptations of 
a single hour, they fell from the very heights 
of virtue and honor into sin and shame. 
The fact is there are no such falls as these, 
or there are next to none. These men and 
women are those who have dallied with 
temptation, who have exposed themselves to 
the influence of it, and have been weakened 
and corrupted by it. If we should get at the 
secret histories of those who stand suddenly 
discovered as vicious, we should find that, 
underneath a blameless outward life, they 
have welcomed and entertained sin in their 
imaginations, until their moral sense was 
blunted, and they were ready for the deed of 
which they thought they were incapable. . . . 
This world of sense built by the imagination 
— how fair and foul it is ! Like a fairy 
island in the sea of life, it smiles in sunlight 
and sleeps in green, known of the world not 
by communion of knowledge, but by per- 
sonal secret discovery ! The waves of every 
ocean kiss its feet. The airs of every clime 
play among its trees, and tire with the volup- 
tuous music which they bear. Flowers bend 
idly to the fall of fountains, and beautiful 



The Secret of the Heart 79 

forms are wreathing their white arms and 
calling for companionship. Out toward this 
charmed island by day and by night a 
million shallops push unseen of each other, 
and of the world of real life left behind, for 
revelry and reward ! The single sailors never 
meet each other : they tread the same paths 
unknown of each other: they come back 
and no one knows and no one asks where 
they have been. There is vice enough in the 
world of actual life, and it is there that we 
look for it, but there is more in that other 
world of the imagination that we do not see 
— vice that poisons, vice that kills, vice that 
makes whited sepulchres of temples that are 
deemed pure, even by multitudes of their 
tenants." 

The history of preaching is rich in examples 
of this power to look into the heart and lay 
bare its secret life. In this, also, Christ 
was our supreme example. He was the 
great interpreter of life. He knew what was 
in men. The good came to his light, and 
the evil fled from him into deeper darkness. 
He recognized the secret unrest and craving 
of the woman at the well. "If thou knewest 
the gift of God, and who it is that saith to 
thee, Give me to drink, thou wouldst have 
asked of him and he would have given thee 



80 Vital Elements of Preaching 

living water." In sharp, stinging rebuke 
he touched the proud, exclusive, hard, selfish 
spirit of Simon. With unerring touch he 
found the weak spot in the life of the rich 
young ruler, the secret unconscious love 
making a god of money within the temple of 
respectable obedience. In words of tender 
compassion and hope he answered the love 
of the broken-hearted woman who washed 
his feet with her tears. 

Paul had this power of showing a man to 
himself. He was brought bound before the 
splendid court of Felix and given liberty to 
speak his message. And he so reasoned of 
self-control, righteousness, and the certainty 
of judgment that Felix was before Paul, 
trembling at the picture of himself. This 
was the power of Jonathan Edwards, the 
reading of his own heart, and through imagi- 
nation looking into the hearts of others. 
His view of truth led him to see the darkest 
lines of character and so to draw them that 
men were afraid of their sin and trembled 
at its judgment. Mr. Spurgeon was often 
interviewed after his sermons by men in deep 
conviction, and sometimes by men in the 
spirit of resentment that he had discovered 
in their lives the secret sin or desire they 
supposed known only to themselves. It 



The Secret of the Heart 81 

was simply his native insight, quickened and 
purified by the spirit of God. 

It was said of Dr. John A. Broadus, the 
noble preacher of the South and the author 
of " The Preparation and Delivery of the 
Sermon/ ' that "He interpreted people to 
themselves. He enabled them to know what 
they did know, and to feel what they had 
long felt. He explained to them their own 
experiences. He laid hold upon things in 
their hearts which had long lain there dormant, 
and told them what they meant. He told 
them all things that they ever did. He said 
things that were so homely and true that 
they thought they had known them all their 
lives. This he did to such an extent that 
the people sometimes suspected that he had 
stolen their thoughts." (" Life of Broadus.") 

How can the preacher gain this power of 
knowing and interpreting the secret of the 
heart ? 

1. By the deep knowledge of self. There 
has been a morbid self-examination in the 
past, often a minute and fearful examina- 
tion of the states of the soul, an unreal 
condemnation of life, almost a nursing of the 
invalid soul, a secret pride and joy in the con- 
fessions of miserable sinners. The devotions 
of the Church have been far too introspective 



82 Vital Elements of Preaching 

and subjective. Our hymnology has often 
sinned against a wholesome view of nature 
and of man. The conception of saint has 
sometimes been narrow and ascetic. It has 
repelled men with red blood in their veins 
to whom life is good. The morbid view of 
self has shut men up to littleness and weak- 
ness. They have felt helpless before the 
mysteries of their own lives, paralyzed before 
the forces of evil. They have not been 
rightly conscious of spiritual power. 

There is a far more wholesome spirit to-day 
in the outward look. The larger interest 
in life, in nature and man, the missionary 
spirit, the social conscience, the enterprise 
of the world, all tend to interpret and em- 
phasize the teachings of the Gospel that look 
to other lives, to the service of men. The 
strongest appeal of Christianity to-day is to 
the desire to serve, to make life count for 
the largest good. To tell young men that 
Christ speaks peace to troubled conscience 
may not win, but in his name to give the 
call of Labrador or China arrests attention 
and calls forth the deepest loyalty. Faith 
matches the truest psychology, that we know 
and grow in the religious life by doing. 
Faith is the question of obedience. 

And yet, we may easily err on the side of 



The Secret of the Heart 83 

the active life. The pendulum to-day swings 
to the other extreme. We may be much 
without in visiting and committees, in or- 
ganizations and addresses, and little within 
in that searching of the spirit that reveals 
the deep things of life. It is often remarked 
that the preaching to-day deals too lightly 
with sin and consequently there is a slight 
conviction of ill-desert, almost no heart- 
agonies, an easy entrance upon the Christian 
profession, and a slight grasp of its significance. 
We would not go back to the prolonged 
disquiet of a Bunyan, a Finney, or even a 
Beecher. We could not and be true to the 
life of our age and our conception of the 
Christian faith. But the Gospel is radical 
in its demands, and cleansing in its life ; and 
we shall not rightly interpret it and be able 
to adapt it to the human heart without that 
self-knowledge that comes from an honest 
look within and the convincing light of the 
Spirit of God. We must know ourselves. 
We must take time to salute our souls and 
learn what sort of men we are. Every 
minister needs daily an honest, searching 
look at life in the quiet of meditation and in 
the pure air of prayer. We must step aside 
from the rush of human effort and the con- 
fusion of earthly opinions and standards, 



84 Vital Elements of Preaching 

try to extricate ourselves from the things we 
are doing, and put the mind of Christ upon 
our life. 

"Take heed to thyself " was the earnest 
charge of a great Apostle to a young minister 
as dear to him as his own son. "Preach to 
your own faults, and you will speak to the 
conscience of men," is the word of a noted 
modern teacher. All vital teaching is per- 
sonal. It comes from self-knowledge and 
experience of the truth. And this deep 
self-knowledge will be the key to unlock other 
lives. 

2. The secret of the heart cannot be gained 
without sympathy with men, feeling the 
"call of the folk," and genuine interest in 
individual men. Self-examination alone may 
lead to eccentric and morbid views of the 
truth. Men have meditated upon truth 
until it seemed to stand before their eyes a 
splendid reality, they have elaborated their 
systems with matchless logic, but they have 
been as unreal as a fabric of the air because 
they did not take account of man and inter- 
pret truth in terms of human sympathy. 
Edwards' doctrine of man was of this nature 
— man developing the seeds of evil, without 
any element of good, in God's world yet 
untouched by God. Such a man is a pure 



The Secret of the Heart 85 

abstraction. He is the creation of a merciless 
logic. He never lived. Every human life 
is a complex of good and evil and " Christ 
is the light that lighteth every man that 
cometh into the world." 

John Henry Newman, trained in the ex- 
treme Calvinism of the Puritan theology, 
got his first rude awakening when preaching 
in Saint Mary's, Oxford. He found that his 
scheme of truth did not fit men, that, by 
actual life, his people could not be divided 
between saints and sinners. " Always it is 
the higher life, pressed, watched, hunted 
by the lower ; always it is Judah with Edom 
at its gates." 

Men purely of the library or of a class, of 
the scholastic or exclusive spirit, rarely in- 
terpret the heart and speak a living word to 
it. You have heard sermons that might just 
as well have been preached in another world. 
They had little humanity in them, and so 
they were not the gospel for men. "The 
sermon should have God for its father, and 
earth for its mother," says a quaint old writer. 

Fellow-feeling not only helps us to read 
the heart, but it is the magic key that un- 
locks the heart. Such a man inevitably 
becomes a father-confessor to his people. 
That is what Charles Kingsley was at 



86 Vital Elements of Preaching 

Eversley and to a world-parish. From all 
parts of the English-speaking world came 
letters, laying bare the heart and asking 
directions for the life. Men who had read 
his " Sermons for the Times," his novels, his 
lectures, felt that here was a preacher who 
really lived with men, felt with men and 
understood men. "I should be ashamed to 
write at such length to any ordinary man," 
says a newspaper man, "but you understand 
things.' ' And Mrs. Kingsley testifies that 
when his sermons were the most pathetic 
and moving, it was always because he was 
trying to minister to some special case of need, 
which he alone knew. 

I remember a boyhood friend who had this 
divine gift of sympathy. Many a time on 
the way to school I have seen him stop and 
talk with some man working on the street, 
and in a perfectly simple and natural way 
would soon have him talking about himself 
and telling the story of his life. And it is 
sympathy that has given him the secrets of 
many hearts and made him the minister of 
life to so many men. 

3. It must be the large sympathy that 
puts the man first, that understands in order 
to help, and the farthest removed from that 
curious interest that noses among other 



The Secret of the Heart 87 

people's affairs, and loves nothing so much 
as talking about them. There is human 
interest and there is idle gossip. The one 
is the bond of a fair society, the other is the 
acid that eats out the strongest structure. 
A gossip in the pulpit, the easy rehearsal of 
personal experience, the sensational flavour- 
ing of the sermon with anecdotes and inci- 
dents, many of them too peculiar or too sacred 
for public utterance, is not proclaiming the 
nobleness of truth or searching the hearts of 
men. 

The sermon is the most personal when the 
personal elements are the most thoroughly 
suffused in the truth; it is the most con- 
vincing and cleansing when the person is 
the most self -unconscious in the message. As 
to all the secrets of life, the preacher should 
have the honour of the doctor; he should 
have the sensitiveness and discretion to make 
such knowledge sacred. A careless speech 
here will shut the door of the heart and make 
the truth worse than futile. 

4. The secret of the heart is gained in a 
large sense by the increasing knowledge of 
human life. He may not know men best 
who is simply intimate with his few asso- 
ciates. No man can be fully understood by 
the local and provincial light. It is less 



88 Vital Elements of Preaching 

true every year that men stand alone. The 
solidarity of man is the marked characteris- 
tic of our time and it will be increasingly so 
until mankind are really one. We are get- 
ting a world-view of life and the smallest 
hamlet is affected by world-thought and 
movements. Theories whose very names 
are unknown will at last percolate to the 
very bottom of the social structure. The 
preacher should be large-minded, have large 
interests, who would do most for the indi- 
vidual. Not only does such a preacher bring 
the tonic of a higher world and is able to see 
facts in their proportion, but he is able to 
interpret each life in the light of its broader 
relations. We are not only to study single 
lives but the facts and forces of the life of 
the age, the great movements of thought and 
action that form the ideas and shape the 
lives of men. 

5. There have been gifted men and women 
whose divine work has been to show man to 
himself, to lay bare the secret motives and 
impulses of human life, to trace the course 
of a soul in the world of probation, to give 
the laws of character in terms of life. They 
are the world's poets and seers. The liter- 
ature of a people is the best index of its 
life, and its clearest mirror. Matthew Arnold 



The Secret of the Eeart 89 

has spiritual insight when he defines litera- 
ture as the " interpretation of life." Tenny- 
son rightly calls the poet the seer. 

"He saw through life and death, through good and ill, 
He saw through his own soul. 
The marvel of the everlasting will, 
An open scroll, 

Before him lay. — " 

A great poet searches the consciousness 
of the age to its lowest depth. He reveals 
depths that we had never sounded, he bodies 
forth the dim and misty strivings that come 
to all men. A great drama like "Macbeth " or 
"Lear" or many a modern play weaves before 
us the very stuff of our life, brings into visible 
action the subconscious life which so power- 
fully directs our course. Many a life for 
the first time catches a glimpse of its kin- 
ship with a race sinning and suffering, and 
instinctively exclaims with the Doctor in 
the sleep-walking scene of " Macbeth," before 
the sudden disclosure of guilt — "God, God 
forgive us all." A soul kindly, thoughtless, 
loving the color and stir of life, might pause 
with startled warning before Mrs. Wharton's 
" House of Mirth," at the merciless sincerity 
of the portrayal, the inevitable descent of 
the lovers of pleasure. 



90 Vital Elements of Preaching 

The preacher who would know the secrets 
of the heart must study such books. They 
will keep the imagination alive, which is the 
power to see what is hidden to the common 
mind. They will connect with the springs 
of pure feeling. They will strengthen those 
universal sympathies which shall help us to 
have the Master's compassion upon the 
multitudes. The well-known preacher was 
not wrong, who connected a sermon on 
prayer, that interpreted the universal in- 
stincts of the heart, and made prayer seem 
natural and necessary, with a winter's 
special study of the dramas of Shakespeare. 

The realism of the heart needs to be 
matched by the realism of the sermon if 
our preaching is to be convincing and cleans- 
ing. Language cannot wholly reveal, the 
best speech is but approximate, but we need 
to be convinced of the dignity and worth of 
speech so that we shall regard the sensa- 
tional as untrue, the showy and vainly rhe- 
torical as unworthy an earnest man. "Give 
me the plain, nervous style," said John 
Wesley. "I am for plain, sound English." 
This realism of speech was one secret of his 
power. Calm, simple, direct, intense, such 
preaching had not been heard in England 
for a century. We shall avoid all abstrac- 



The Secret of the Heart 91 

tion, all vagueness and unreality, and aim at 
the vivid and genuine and sympathetic 
expression of truth and life as we know them. 
We shall strive for the simplicity that always 
marks reality, the unveiled truth. 

Need I say that the whole process of such 
preaching is connected with the moral life 
of the preacher? To give truth its voice, 
we must see clearly and feel strongly. That 
is spiritually connected with the whole 
moral nature. Freedom from the profes- 
sional and class spirit, regard for man as 
man, stripped of the accidents of place and 
work, the singleness to this ideal in the Gospel 
of the Son of Man, are the moral conditions 
for spiritual vision, for knowing and inter- 
preting the secret of the heart. 



LECTURE V. THE HUMAN TOUCH 

Matthew 8 : 3. "And he stretched forth his hand, 
and touched him." 



LECTURE V 

The Human Touch 

It is significant that in nearly every act 
of healing Christ conveyed his power through 
personal touch. The touch was the neces- 
sary point of contact. It expressed his 
feeling with men, his oneness with them, and 
established the relation of sympathy by 
which his power could be felt. 

1. The touch is the illustration of the 
transcendent act by which the Son of Man 
became flesh. It is the symbol of his per- 
fect identification with the nature and needs 
of our human life. The very same word is 
used in the Epistle to the Hebrews to de- 
scribe the Incarnation: "For verily, not of 
angels doth he take hold, but he taketh hold 
of the seed of Abraham." 

2. The personal touch is the law of the 
Incarnation. It is the universal law of help. 
What Christ did, we must do, if we are to 
help men in his name. The truth is to be 
propagated, the new life given by personal 
contact. " Faith saves by getting a living 

95 



96 Vital Elements of Preaching 

hold of the Christ who saves." No man 
was ever saved except by bringing him into 
personal relation with the Christ. Not 
creeds, forms, activities, — save as Christ 
lives in them and through them, — touch 
the lives of men. "And ye shall be endued 
with power after that the Holy Ghost is 
come upon you, and ye shall be witnesses 
for me at Jerusalem and in Samaria and unto 
the uttermost parts of the Earth." The 
power is the spirit of God in the lives of 
men, and the method is the personal touch 
of vitalized lives. 

3. In this matter of touch, Christianity 
is no exception. It does not violate our 
nature. It is in the completest accord with 
the laws of life. It simply uses and sancti- 
fies the laws of human nature. It is the uni- 
versal law of help. Men must be helped 
just where they are. We cannot form our 
beautiful ideals, and knock out all the 
rounds of the ladder, and say, "Go up there 
and be saved." The unknown must be 
taught in the terms of the known. Enlarged 
knowledge and life must grow from present 
experience. That's the way the child learns 
and man never outgrows the law. If we are 
to convince men we must begin with ad- 
mitted truth. We must stand where they 



The Human Touch 97 

are and show the way. The appeal must be 
to experience, and it can never get beyond 
this tried guide. The power of illustration 
is the new flash on common knowledge ; 
it lights up familiar truth or translates the 
unknown. In teaching to-day, much is 
rightly made of the point of contact. It is 
the getting hold of the child, forming some 
bond of interest and sympathy. Nothing 
can be done without it. 

The study of lives is ever more important 
than the study of books. How useless the 
teacher who does not remember his own boy- 
hood, and how matchless the influence of 
him who keeps the youthful spirit, who is 
just a big boy ! And he who would minister 
in Christ's name cannot get too close to 
others. There must be no isolation, or 
superiority, no exclusiveness, or condescen- 
sion, but a genuine brotherhood, a true 
Messianic entrance into the sins and bur- 
dens, the struggles and hopes of men. We 
must not despise the lower feelings of men 
if we would elevate them. It is very easy 
to pitch the key too high for men to follow. 

A man said of his pastor, "he presents the 
truth so that I should like to follow it, and 
he makes me feel that I can follow it." 
Charles Kingsley used to say that he found 



98 Vital Elements of Preaching 

men by their leading ideas, and then tried, 
often insensibly, to bring them to his lead- 
ing ideas, the redemption through Christ. 

We must not shrink from the unlovely 
and degraded. Natural love must be con- 
trolled by a higher love. Instinct, taste, 
appreciation, reward must all be governed 
by the love of Christ. Christ put forth his 
hand and touched the leper, and our hand of 
sympathy and helpfulness must be upon the 
sorest need of man. 

It is easy to let the conventional spirit in 
form and method interfere with the reaching 
of men. Tradition and habit may fail to 
meet the changing conditions of life. It is 
said of the men of the Church, " There is a 
progressive spirit among our men that insists 
on getting things done for the saving of men, 
even though old and honoured methods must 
be laid aside. There is a willingness to study 
the use of things fitted to the day's needs that 
is vitalizing hundreds of churches, and mak- 
ing religion real to many men who have 
hitherto held it as a matter of creedal belief. 
The dignified and historic in our church life 
can the better be conserved, if we will use it 
to sanctify ingenious and efficient means of 
saving men, even though they may possibly 
be entirely unconventional." 



The Human Touch 99 

Here, if anywhere, is the weakness of our 
voluntary Christianity. We have followed 
too much the natural law of the world. 
All that helps men in a material sense, better 
sanitation, better wages, better food, better 
homes, tends to separate them from the less 
worthy, or the less fortunate. The despair 
of our Christian civilization are the Belgra- 
vias and White Chapels, the Fifth Avenues 
and Mott Streets, the walls of moral and 
social separation. Against these walls the 
common efforts of the churches seem as 
helpless as waves against a rocky shore. 
Christian brotherhood alone will break these 
walls down. The heathenism of our great 
cities, and the heathenism of foreign lands 
will never yield, save by the personal touch. 

"Is charity the giving of worn-out gar- 
ments?" asks an earnest thinker. "Is it a 
ten-dollar bill, given to a paid visitor or sec- 
retary of some benevolent organization in 
the Church? Shall the man never go and 
give the gift himself? Shall the woman 
never deny herself her reception or party or 
musicale, and go and actually touch, herself, 
the foul, sinful sore of diseased humanity, as 
it festers in the great Metropolis? Shall 
charity be conventionally and easily done 
through some organization? Is it possible 



100 Vital Elements of Preaching 

to organize the affections so that love shall 
work disagreeable things by proxy ?" In 
vain will be our philanthropy, education, 
religion, unless it comes warm through the 
touch of a brother man. 

Let me say again that our very Gospel has 
come in this way. Christ did not think his 
heavenly superiority something to be grasped 
and held for himself, but he emptied him- 
self, became a man, subject to all the limi- 
tations of our earthly life. The redemptive 
power of God must come through a human 
life. 

And every noble servant of Christ is an 
example of this law. How Paul embodied 
it ! See him working on the coarse goats' 
hair tents, perhaps with rough, godless men, 
that he might get closer to the lives of others 
and not be a burden to the young churches ! 
He loved men so that he gave himself to them. 
"We were well pleased to impart unto you, 
not the Gospel of God only, but also our 
own souls." 

There is a special demand for the personal 
touch now. The old individualism is pass- 
ing and giving place to a sense of humanity. 
And Christianity must incorporate itself in 
the entire life of man. A hopeful expression 
of this spirit is the Social Settlement, where 



The Human Touch 101 

the best men and women live where they are 
the most needed, and carry the spirit of Christ 
into the mass of pinched and crippled and 
hopeless life. How can salt save, unless it 
touches the thing to be salted ! 

Of all the men of our times, the foreign 
missionary most needs and I think best 
exemplifies the personal touch of Christ. 
Every true missionary is a social settlement. 
He seeks to establish close, friendly relations 
with the community. About him are the 
seemingly impenetrable walls of strange 
language, customs, religion. He is not 
wanted. He is looked upon with suspicion, 
and perhaps with hatred. He is called a 
foreign devil. His purpose is not under- 
stood, and ugly stories are told about him, 
and terrible prejudices raised against him. 
He may preach the Gospel until every man 
has heard, but that is not fulfilling Christ's 
command "to make disciples of all nations." 
Ears have they, but they hear not. Here is 
the wall of ignorance, misconception, and 
hatred ! Little by little it is broken down, 
by simply living in the closest and most lov- 
ing way, identified with their life, here a 
little, and there a little, a kind word and a 
helpful act, the patient endurance of suffer- 
ing, the unselfish ministry of love, until the 



102 Vital Elements of Preaching 

real life is known, the personal touch is made, 
and the power of Christ is felt to heal. 

I have tried to draw this truth of the 
human touch on a large scale, showing its 
relation to all life, that we may feel how 
universal and invariable the principle is. 
Preaching is just as much subject to it as 
any other action that tries to affect men. 
In fact, preaching is the most subtle and 
effective example of it. 

The human touch understands that which 
is most urgent in the life of men, the thought 
and speech that reach the age, and the use 
of these. Lincoln had the human touch, 
when he felt the life of the nation and viewed 
it with such matchless simplicity in his 
Gettysburg address. The late Dr. John 
A. Broadus had the human touch, when he 
ignored the diffuse and inflated speech with 
which religious sentiment was expressed by 
the popular preachers of his time and used 
the simple realism of daily speech for the 
vital truths of religion. 

Some men preach and their word meets 
the barrier of alien hearts. Men do not 
find themselves in it, or anything they should 
desire. The word of others recognizes the 
kinship of human lives, and it finds the heart 
and wins the response of faith and obedience. 



The Human Touch 103 

The late Dr. John Watson (Ian Mac- 
laren) has finely expressed the human touch 
in the sermon by the word humanness. In 
the lecture on the technique of a sermon, he 
states the fourth canon as humanity. "One 
has heard able and pious sermons which might 
as well have been preached in Mars, for any 
relation they had to our life and environ- 
ment. They suggested the address a dis- 
embodied spirit might give to his brethren 
in the intermediate state, where it is alleged 
we shall exist without physical correspon- 
dence. While the preacher should be very 
sparing with I, it ought to be possible for 
an expert to compose a biography of him 
from a year's sermons. 

" The minister ought to be soaked in life ; 
not that his sermons may never escape from 
local details, but rather that, being in con- 
tact with the life nearest him, he may state 
his Gospel in terms of human experience. 
No doctrine of the Christian faith is worth 
preserving which cannot be verified in daily 
life, and no doctrine will need to be defended 
when stated in human terms — above all, 
in the language of home. It was Jesus' 
felicitous manner to remove his Evangel 
from the sphere of abstract discussion, and 
to assert its reasonableness in the sphere of 



104 Vital Elements of Preaching 

life. 'What man among you?' was his 
favourite plea. God does exactly what a 
man does or wants to do when he is at his 
best. The divinity of a sermon is in pro- 
portion to its humanity." (" Cure of Souls," 
p. 55.) 

Why do certain preachers lack the human 
touch t 

1. From an undue intellectual interest. 
They are men of the library, devoted to in- 
tellectual pursuits and tastes. They love 
books more than they do men. They be- 
come members of the most exclusive set, the 
set of the intellectually cultured, and there 
is narrowness and limitation in any intellec- 
tual caste. "An exclusive, undemocratic 
spirit is a sorry defect in any musician!" 
All the great poets are universal in their 
sympathies. This gives them their pro- 
phetic element. And the man who preaches 
the largest truth must have something of 
this universal touch. 

It must be confessed, there is something 
splendid in Mrs. Stowed picture of the 
Puritan minister, in "A Minister's Wooing," 
moulding his system of thought, and living 
It out with rapt enthusiasm. But we must 
also feel that the warm, human blood does 
not flow in it. Such intellectual exclusive- 



The Human Touch 105 

ness not only takes a man away from the 
mass of his fellows, so that he is unable to 
understand their life, but it makes his mes- 
sage an unreal thing to them. Live awhile 
in the University atmosphere, and then 
walk the streets, and enter the shops and 
stores, and you will feel the " worlds apart " 
in these lives. 

A minister must be a man of two worlds. 
And there is a subtle temptation to feel that 
if the people do not understand him and 
respond to his tastes, it must be their fault, 
and not his. "I am throwing my life away 
on this shoe town," such a minister once 
wrote to Austin Phelps, of course asking 
his help in getting a more cultivated field. 
And Dr. Phelps tried to show him that the 
peculiar power of the Gospel and its highest 
glory was in doing just such kind of work. 
If it could not save a shoe town, it was 
worth nothing. 

"A preacher had better work in the dark, 
with nothing but mother-wit, a quickened 
conscience, and a Saxon Bible to teach him 
what to do and how to do it, than to vault 
into an aerial ministry, in which only the 
upper classes shall know or care anything 
about him. You had better go and talk the 
Gospel in the Cornish dialect to the miners 



106 Vital Elements of Preaching 

who told the witnesses, summoned by the 
committee of the English parliament that 
they had 'never heard of Mister Jesus in 
these mines/ than to do the work of the 
Bishop of London. Make your ministry 
reach the people; in the forms of purest 
culture, if you can, but reach the people; 
with elaborate doctrine if possible, but reach 
the people; with classic speech, if it may 
be, but reach the people. The great prob- 
lem of life to a cultivated ministry is to make 
their culture a power, instead of a luxury. 
Our temptations are all one way; our mis- 
sion is all the other." (Austin Phelps, 
"Theory of Preaching," p. 583.) 

2. Preachers lack the human touch through 
the dogmatic spirit. This comes also from 
the preponderance of intellectual interest. 
Clear thinking, correct belief, are made the 
chief thing. The Gospel is put into formulas 
of belief and the important work is to bring 
the human mind to assent to these proposi- 
tions. Such a preacher is out of sympathy 
with men who differ from him. Correct 
views are important, but far more important 
is the attitude of the inner life, desire, and 
will toward the life demanded. Where there 
is no tolerance, the feeling that truth is in- 
finitely more than our view of it, and that 



The Human Touch 107 

all difference of opinion may be harmonized 
in the love of God, there can be little sym- 
pathy, and so little human touch. 

3. There may be a sort of idealism far be- 
yond the reach of men, too good for human 
nature's daily food. Certain men have a 
type of other-worldliness, a pietistic spirit 
that does not take note of common things, 
that does not bring heavenly wisdom down 
to dwell among men. I know a devoted 
minister who told me that he had given up 
all general reading and studied only his 
Bible. He bears the mark of isolation on his 
face; there is a gulf ever growing between 
his thought and the people's. It is an ex- 
ample of the contest which has frequently 
taken place in the history of Christianity 
between humanism and pietism. Humanism, 
the love of beauty in the world, in Art, and 
Literature, the love of life in all its forms 
and activities, — this must be harmonized 
with piety, the love and service of God. All 
heavenly truths and inspirations must be 
brought to common men to make all life 
more interesting and to dignify and glorify 
their part in it. 

There is an other-worldliness that can 
never appeal to men — Christ did not take 
hold of angels, but of men. It comes from 



108 Vital Elements of Preaching 

a partial view of the Gospel as a scheme im- 
posed upon us, rather than a life born in us, 
as essential and human and livable as the life 
of the race. 

How shall we have and express the human 
touch in our preaching? 

1. Be determined to know what men think 
and feel, by daily rubbing up against men, and 
by the study of those works in which the life 
of the age is revealed. The late Dr. Edward 
Everett Hale gave as one of the principles of 
his own life the effort to come in contact daily 
with all sorts of men. The cultivation of 
friendship is the training of heart and speech 
for the sympathetic ministry to real condi- 
tions. It was said of Dr. John Watson as 
a student at Edinburgh University: "No 
matter where you put him down, he will be 
at home with the man at his elbow." 

Dr. Faunce, speaking of the "Education 
of the Minister by his Task/' says: "After 
spending years in the study of literature and 
theology, it is a startling and wholesome ex- 
perience to be flung out into a parish, and 
to be compelled to face those primitive human 
experiences which are the source of all the 
theologies of the ages. The average Semi- 
nary gives a man so little of that clinical 
experience which is the special aim of the 



The Human Touch 109 

Medical school, that the young minister may 
feel far more at home in the alcove of a 
library than in a group of men assembled 
to discuss some public wrong, or in a com- 
pany of friends gathered to comfort a be- 
reaved household. It is his intellectual sal- 
vation to be plucked out of a bookish life, 
and thrust into the tumultuous and com- 
plicated strivings of a neighbourhood, where 
the noblest and meanest passions of humanity 
are grappling for mastery. Amid such lurid 
and pathetic realities, how pale and shadowy 
seem the classroom discussions ! What a 
flood of light is poured on the old problems 
by the new emergency ! Actually to face 
the drunkard and the libertine, and pull him 
out of the miry clay, actually to grapple 
with the greed of gain as it throttles leading 
members of the Church, actually to meet 
the sneers of the scornful with patience, and 
the objection of the sceptic with candour, to 
offer some genuine consolation to the man 
whose last hope is under the sod, and to re- 
joice with them that do rejoice — which is 
often harder than to weep with them that 
weep — this is to gain such insight into 
human souls as no poetry or fiction or Uni- 
versity study can give, and to undergo inev- 
itable revisions of one's formulation of truth." 



110 Vital Elements of Preaching 

The first change in Newman was when he 
found that the sharp division of the old 
Evangelicals was not borne out by the actual 
life of men. Bishop Potter took an East 
Side parish for one of his summer vacations. 
In such ways his sermons gained the note of 
reality when they touched upon social ques- 
tions. It is in this spirit that Ambrose 
Shepperd of Glasgow says that every preacher 
might well have one year in a factory. And 
in his sermons you feel that note of reality 
that comes from a deep experience. He 
actually knows how men think and feel and 
his word meets actual conditions. 

Dr. Winnington-Ingram, the present 
Bishop of London, always speaks on a level 
with men. There is a wonderful accent of 
genuineness and humanity, conviction and 
sympathy, in everything that he says. And 
he had his training in East London. He 
learned how men actually lived. He learned 
to preach on Bethnal Green, where the 
audience had the liberty of talking back, and 
freely exercised it. There he learned to feel 
with men, and speak to their hearts. 

2. We can determine to test truth our- 
selves, pass it through our own experience. 
Truth thus humanized will be free from 
speculation and exaggeration. Such truth, 



The Human Touch 111 

honestly applied to ourselves, cannot fail 
of the human touch — if we make no de- 
mand of our hearers that we have not first 
made of our own hearts — only, we must 
not make the mistake of applying the rule 
of thumb to the visions and agonies of 
prophets and apostles ; we must not imagine 
that "the mystery of godliness" can be 
wholly sphered in our personal experience 
of it. A truer knowledge of the inner life 
of men, especially the right interpretation of 
our own experience, will certainly give to the 
pulpit a closer touch with the human heart. 
" Perhaps the chief value of the study of 
human growth and development is in the 
reinforcement which comes to the central 
truths of Christianity when they are inter- 
preted in terms of life. Many theological 
difficulties are to be solved, not by the path- 
way of metaphysics, but by a deeper under- 
standing of the spiritual fife of man. Per- 
haps the chief advance which preachers like 
Robertson of Brighton and Phillips Brooks 
made on their predecessors lies here. We 
cannot claim that these modern prophets 
excel their great forbears in philosophic 
grasp, in logical acumen, but they clearly 
do excel in their psychological power, in 
their capacity for intuition into the hopes 



112 Vital Elements of Preaching 

and fears and remorses and aspirations of 
humanity. They lay bare our hearts ; they 
flash a torch in the secret chambers of 
imagery; they expose our deepest motives 
to our startled gaze, and interpret our con- 
fused struggle with a seer's insight." (Faunce, 
p. 183.) 

3. The human touch comes from faith in 
the Christ to meet the nature of man and 
faith in man to respond to the truth. Its 
spirit is hopefulness. It believes in the son- 
ship of man and calls it forth. There is no 
place for censoriousness in a pulpit that is 
touched with the feeling of our infirmities, 
and knows the struggles and fears of the 
human heart. A critical mind is necessary 
that can separate the false from the true, 
the accidental from the essential. But a 
positive, hopeful, constructive preaching is 
that which knows the real nature of man, 
lays hold of his deepest needs, and awakens 
and sustains in him the life of the spirit. 

The human touch — the brotherhood of 
the preacher — will express itself in the most 
subtle and effective ways. It will permeate 
the message of the sermon, and make it felt 
as a word of life. Truth will be regarded 
not as something thought out, but also felt 
out, and lived out. The effort will be not 



The Human Touch 113 

so much to give the opinions about truth, 
as to connect the message with every man's 
life. The sermon is not a mere thoughtful 
and suggestive discussion about some truth 
of Christ, but the effort, as a messenger, 
directly to convey his word. Its supreme 
aim is not the giving of knowledge, but the 
giving of life. 

So, inevitably, the preacher of a broad and 
sympathetic humanity will not magnify local 
and individual peculiarities, but dwell upon 
those truths that are for all men. He will 
be forever trying to get beneath that form 
of truth which is temporary and arbitrary, 
to that which is natural and essential and 
eternal. 

Here, I take it, is the special power of the 
message of Phillips Brooks. It is so fitted 
to man, so human in the divinest sense, so 
essential in its nature, that it has the power 
of the great heart from which it comes, and 
adaptation to every man. 

The preacher with the human touch will 
constantly make his appeal to life, will show 
his kinship with men. His first thought 
will be to find the point of contact with his 
audience, and all he says and does will have 
the aim of helpfulness. Explanation, pro- 
cesses of reasoning, illustration, will have one 



114 Vital Elements of Preaching 

test applied, will it commend the word to 
the hearts of men ? Its speech will be human, 
the best speech of daily life. It will not wear 
the garments of a profession, it will not speak 
a peculiar dialect, known to the religious ; 
it will be instinct with life, using such speech 
as will quickest convey the message to the 
hearts of men, such speech as you use with 
men when you discuss matters of common 
interest. However, let it be remembered that 
it is no mark of genuine sympathy with men, 
and never commends the Gospel of the Son 
of Man, to use careless, irreverent speech. 

The spirit of humanness is seen in the whole 
attitude of the preacher to his people. He is 
a brother-man, unable to condescend, and too 
brave to flatter, a man of like passions, strong 
to rebuke evil and quick to pity the sinner, 
commanding by virtue of his manhood, and 
persuading by the reasonableness of his word 
and the tenderness and sincerity of his feeling. 



LECTURE VI. THE MINISTRY OF 
COMFORT 

Isaiah 50 : 4. "The Lord hath given me the tongue 
of the disciple, that I should know how to speak a word 
in season to him that is weary." 



LECTURE VI 

The Ministry of Comfort 

Austin Phelps in "Men and Books' ' 
speaks of the frequent failure of the pulpit 
in the ministry of comfort. "If there is one 
thing more obvious than another in the 
general strain of apostolic preaching, it is 
the preponderance of words of encourage- 
ment over those of reproof and commina- 
tion. In no other thing did inspired 
preachers disclose their inspired knowledge 
of human conditions more clearly. The 
world of to-day needs the same adaptation 
of the pulpit to its wants. We preach to a 
struggling and suffering humanity; tempted 
men and sorrowing women are our hearers. 
Never is a sermon preached, but to some 
hearers who are carrying a load of secret 
grief. To such we need to speak as to 'one 
whom his mother comforteth.' What deli- 
cacy of touch, what refinement of speech, 
what tenderness of tone, what reverent ap- 
proach, as to holy ground, do we not need to 
discharge this part of a preacher's mission, 
117 



118 Vital Elements of Preaching 

and therefore what rounded knowledge of 
human conditions !" 

Dr. John Watson held that the chief end 
of preaching was comfort. " Never can I 
forget/' he writes, "what a distinguished 
scholar, who used to sit in my church, once 
said to me : ' Your best work in the pulpit 
has been to put heart into men for the coming 
week ! ' I wish I had put more. And when 
I have in my day, like us all, attempted to 
reconcile science and religion, one of the 
greatest men of science, who used also to be a 
hearer in my church, never seemed interested, 
but when I dealt with the deep affairs of the 
soul, he would come round in the afternoon 
to talk it out." 

No preacher of our time has spoken more to 
the heart of his people, and yet after he had 
resigned his pulpit at Sefton Park, Liverpool, 
Dr. Watson, in a series of articles in the British 
Weekly, on "It might have been," reviewing 
his ministry of twenty-five years, regrets his 
failure in this particular, and says that if he 
had his life over again, he would more fre- 
quently in his sermons have words of 
comfort. 

I. Cases that need comfort. It is well to 
consider some typical cases found in every 
congregation, that we may understand the 



The Ministry of Comfort 119 

universal, ever present need of the preaching 
of comfort. 

There is the sorrow that comes from the 
loss of loved ones. Little children are taken 
with their fresh and innocent lives, and 
heaven seems to have gone out of earth. 
Young men and maidens leave us, full of 
fair hopes and beautiful promises. Men 
and women in the prime of life, bearing bur- 
dens, essential to the home and the Church 
and society, are stricken down; their lives 
were bound up with ours, we do not see how 
we can live without them. Their going is 
a rude shaking of our lives, we are never 
quite the same again. Amid all the bright, 
joyous things of life there is a note of sadness. 
The aged, the weak, the infirm pass from our 
sight. It may be like the garnering of a 
ripened sheaf, but we are never ready for it. 
The loss may be felt in proportion to their 
dependence, to the burden and assiduity of 
our care. 

A young minister, considering a change of 
work, said, "I do not see how I can leave my 
people. Why ! I have either married some 
one, or buried some one from every home of 
my congregation. " So many families have 
been bereft that the very church seems some- 
times like a house of mourning. With our 



120 Vital Elements of Preaching 

youthful vigour, with the warm blood pulsing 
in our veins, with life all before us, we may 
ignore the shadows of life. We make our 
plans and do our work as though death were 
not. But the familiar words of Longfellow 
are the truest words of human experience. 

"There is no flock, however watched and tended, 
But one dead lamb is there ! 
There is no fireside, howsoe'er defended, 
But has one vacant chair ! 

"The air is full of farewells to the dying, 
And mournings for the dead ; 
The heart of Rachel for her children crying, 
Will not be comforted !" 

Many a mother has buried her dearest 
hope out of sight, and goes with a broken 
heart all her days until she is laid by the 
child of her early love. And I have known 
an old man of nearly ninety, reticent of his 
feelings, never revealing his heart to his 
dearest friends, speak the name in his last 
hours of the baby girl that he had lost more 
than sixty years before. These wounded 
hearts are before us every Sunday that we 
preach. 

There are deeper sorrows than those of 
death, the tragedies of moral failure. A 
child, seemingly trained with the utmost 



The Ministry of Comfort 121 

care, takes the reins of life into his own 
hands and drives in the path of unrestrained 
desire. The youth, once so sensitive and 
reverent and highminded, has now grown 
coarse and sceptical and flippant. Lives 
that began in love and trust have now grown 
apart. I do not know any dramatic inter- 
pretation of this common experience of the 
silent and gradual alienation of lives equal to 
Browning's "By the Fireside," in "James 
Lee's Wife." 

"Who lived here before us two? 
Old-world pairs. 

Did a woman ever — would I knew ! — 
Watch the man 
With whom began 

Love's voyage full-sail, — (now gnash your teeth !) 
When planks start, open Hell beneath 
Unawares?" 

The glory of the dawn has faded into 
common day, and though careful to maintain 
the outward appearance, they both face the 
hollow mockeries of life. Many a noble 
woman is bound, to use Kingsley's strong 
words, 

"0 waste of nature — to a craven hound, 
To shameless lust, and childish greed of pelf, 
Athene to a satyr." 



122 Vital Elements of Preaching 

There are sorrows where one would least 
expect them. Not the pains of parting, or 
of moral failure, but the pains of growing life. 
The sorrows of youth are no less keen than the 
sorrows of age. There is a time when the 
youth finds little satisfaction in himself, 
when the world of life suddenly widens, 
when he reaches out beyond self after other 
things and other lives. It is the first sharp 
sense of the limitation of life. So much to 
know, so much to do, such heights to attain ! 
The way so steep and rough, the strength so 
little ! When the youth goes to college or 
school, or enters upon work there is the sud- 
den widening of the horizons of life. The 
new experiences refuse to be stated in the 
familiar forms. 

"So many worlds, so much to do, 
So little done, such things to be." 

(" In Memoriam.") 

Sometimes it leads to doubt and always to 
unrest, and often to despondency. Do you 
remember when you awoke for the first time 
to the sense of responsibility for others? 
The old, sweet, care-free life was gone for- 
ever, and the burdens of others' sins and 
sorrows and weaknesses pressed upon your 
unused faculties with painful force. It is 



The Ministry of Comfort 123 

one of the sorrowful experiences of youth; 
and the time of vigour and hope and joy, the 
beautiful days of youth are to some natures 
of peculiar sensitiveness the period of pathetic 
sorrows. 

There is the sorrow of loneliness. There 
are some lives that are physically separate 
and isolated. They are left in the world 
without kindred, the remnant of a broken 
family, the last leaf on the tree. If to this 
natural isolation is added the force of mis- 
fortune, business reverses, physical weakness, 
keeping them from active touch in the world's 
affairs, they are largely shut up to themselves, 
in the community and yet not vitally of it. 

Then there are natures of peculiar sensitive- 
ness, perhaps morbidly so, to whom the world 
is a rough and unfeeling place, who suffer from 
daily contact with men, whose feelings are 
bruised, and pure tastes offended, who do not 
make themselves understood, who are not 
only misinterpreted, but under harsh and 
false judgment. Their timidity is called 
pride, their sensitiveness exclusiveness. 
They think themselves incapable and un- 
lovable, and living brings its sorrow. And 
there is a certain isolation in goodness itself. 
Higher ideals, purer tastes inevitably tend 
to separate from the mass of men. And yet, 



124 Vital Elements of Preaching 

these very lives have the strongest desire 
to be one with men and be helpful to them. 
Robertson in his sermon on "The Loneliness 
of Christ" describes such lives. " There are 
times when hands touch ours, but only send 
an icy chill of unsympathizing indifference 
to the heart : when eyes gaze into ours, but 
with a glazed look which cannot read into 
the bottom of our souls : when words pass 
from our lips, but only come back as an echo 
reverberated without replying through a 
dreary solitude — when the multitude throng 
and press us, and we cannot say as Christ 
said, ' Somebody hath touched me/ for the 
contact has been not between soul and soul, 
but only between form and form." 

Then there is the sorrow of seeming failure. 
The ocean of faith is not always full, and 
sometimes the tide is out, and the flats of life 
lie bare and ugly, and full of the malaria of 
the doubting spirit. The world is not a 
friend to God. Spiritual forces cannot be 
estimated by worldly standards, and we are 
all affected by the sign-seeking generation. 
Spiritual life does not seem rewarded and "we 
fret ourselves because of him that prospereth 
in his way, because of the man who bringeth 
wicked devices to pass." 

To many the attainment of life seems out 



The Ministry of Comfort 125 

of proportion to the discipline and the 
struggle. There is the sorrow of the un- 
attained. They reach middle life, and there 
are no great changes ; there is the same daily- 
routine, the same daily temptations and the 
same need of forgiveness at the day's close. 
Their religious faith is the persistency of 
long habit more than the outreaching of the 
living spirit. They expect no great changes 
in themselves or in others; the forces of life 
they know, and no more seems possible to 
them, and their lives sink into a regretful 
indifference or a restless pessimism. They 
are too good to enjoy evil and they are not 
good enough to be happy. 

These five are typical cases of sorrow to be 
met in every congregation. And besides 
these broad classes, there are special cases to 
be detected by the pastor who really feels 
the pulse of his people. The loss of goods, 
the changes of home, the perplexities of 
faith, the mystery of suffering, a sense of the 
world-sorrow. 

II. How shall we minister in our preaching 
to the comfort of men? 

The first thing we are to do and the best 
thing we can do, and often the only thing 
we can do, is to give the sense of God. To 
make men feel the reality of God's person 



126 Vital Elements of Preaching 

and presence. You cannot explain the 
mystery of suffering, but anything that will 
make God known, or awaken in men the in- 
stinctive, latent sense of God will still their 
fears and quiet the tumults of the heart. 
You remember as a child waking at dead 
of night and crying out for father or mother. 
The answer comes back through the gloom, 
1 ' What is it, my boy ? " That is all you need 
to know. You do not care to tell your 
trouble. The fact of your father's presence 
gives you rest. Just the fact of God is the 
deepest comfort men can have, and there is 
comfort nowhere else. 

"I smile to think God's greatness 
Flows around our incompleteness : 
Round our restlessness 
His rest." 

The ministry of comfort gives the sense of 
the reality and certainty of spiritual forces. 
We see how the resurrection lifted the dis- 
ciples out of sorrow and depression ; the 
cross and the grave were not the end of the 
Gospel story, but they were only the steps 
of a larger life. The sacrificial life is the 
victorious life. In this spiritual vision they 
lived and laboured, even counting it joy to 
suffer for Christ's sake. 



The Ministry of Comfort 127 

Many of the deepest sorrows of men are 
because of their short-sightedness. They do 
not see the meaning of their lives. Events 
and forces touch them and break their plans, 
or defeat their most unselfish labours, and 
they question whether the forces of life are 
moral and spiritual. One is sometimes 
forced to say with Arthur : 

"0 me ! for why is all around us here 
As if some lesser God had made the world, 
But had not force to shape it as he would." 

To interpret life, to show how it is always 
moral, all things under law from the eagle's 
wing to the seed vessel that finds its place 
in the earth, how that nothing is forgotten, 
nothing omitted, that God's word in the soul 
is as sure as God's word in Nature, that "he 
that goeth forth with weeping, bearing 
precious seed, shall without doubt come 
again with rejoicing bringing his sheaves 
with him," — this is to bring consolation 
and inspiration to weary and despondent 
man. 

" Strengthen ye the weak hands, and con- 
firm the feeble knees." " Wherefore, my 
beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, immovable, 
always abounding in the work of the Lord, 
forasmuch as ye know that your labor is 



128 Vital Elements of Preaching 

not vain in the Lord." The true preacher 
should seek to deserve the words of Faber : 

"Thrice blessed is he to whom is given 
The instinct that can tell 
That God is on the field when He 
Is most invisible. 

" Blest too is he who can divine 
Where real right doth He, 
And dares to take the side that seems 
Wrong to man's blindfold eye." 

Then we should dwell upon the present 
compensations of life. Our preaching should 
make the Christian life the most glorious 
life possible. No man has more reason or 
right to be happy than the Christian preacher. 
To feel the divine sanctions of his calling, 
and to have the vision of its ultimate issue 
is to sustain in the life a noble optimism. 
Galton's characterization of the Protestant 
clergy in his " Hereditary Genius" as "men 
of a gently complaining spirit" is a serious 
criticism upon their faith. Our message of 
cheer must not be a sort of "whistling to 
keep our courage up," but must be the 
natural and inevitable outflow of a life that 
is spiritual and so sees above the cloud rack. 

The late Dr. Maltbie Babcock, standing 
upon our campus one brilliant October 



The Ministry of Comfort 129 

morning, said of a man who has given com- 
fort to many of our time: "Our friend is 
just like this October morning — no clouds, 
no mists, no malaria, the air clear to the ut- 
most marge : the very sight of him puts new 
heart into life." Such a life preaches a nor- 
mal and shining gospel, it makes " godliness 
profitable for the life that now is." Is life a 
struggle? That is what a true man glories 
in. Does it cost pain and hardship and 
self-denial? That is true of everything 
good, and nothing is so good as the life of 
faith. 

And we are not to emphasize the cross at 
the expense of the natural joy of life. We 
are to present such a conception of the Chris- 
tian life that it will seem the only normal life, 
the life with the greatest treasures and hopes 
and possibilities here. Paul gives the truest 
philosophy of preaching in his letter to the 
Philippians : 

" Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever 
things are honorable, whatsoever things are 
just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever 
things are lovely, whatsoever things are of 
good report, if there be any virtue, and if 
there be any praise, think on these things." 

We must not fail to give the comfort of 
the Immortal Life. The hope of it hangs 



130 Vital Elements of Preaching 

in the sky of human life like a golden promise. 
Christ does not satisfy our curiosity, but He 
makes the hope of heaven very real. The 
infinite spaces are not filled with mysterious 
dread, but are folded down upon us in meas- 
ureless benediction. Jesus calls it the 
Father's house. To tried and suffering men 
the Apostolic writers ever speak of the 
heavenly hope. 

The hymns that picture the future bliss 
have been among the chief consolations of 
the Church. I know it is not the fashion 
for the modern pulpit to speak much of the 
future reward or the future punishment. A 
wise agnosticism leads men to be silent about 
those things of which Christ spoke so little. 
But we cannot be wholly silent concerning 
the undying yearning for life, and concerning 
the truth revealed by the word and resurrec- 
tion of our Lord. Souls need this supreme 
word for comfort. Bernard of Cluny voices 
it for us : 

"For thee, dear, dear country, 
Mine eyes their vigils keep ; 
For very love, beholding 
Thy happy name, they weep. 
The mention of Thy glory 
Is unction to the breast, 
And medicine in sickness, 
And love and life and rest." 



The Ministry of Comfort 131 

A word about the spirit of the special 
ministry of comfort. We should always have 
some definite person in mind to be helped. 
Thus our words will be kept from unreality 
and the professional tone, and have the com- 
passion and fitness of a living message. 

We are to cultivate a brave, hopeful spirit 
in all our preaching. The presence of sorrow 
must not give a minor key to our preaching. 
Optimism is the only Christian spirit, and by 
the brave looking upon the best we can put 
heart and hope into men. 

And our preaching must call to practical 
life and service. There are no more touch- 
ing words in the Gospel than those of Jesus 
on the Cross to his mother and to John. To 
his mother, sorrowing above other mothers, 
he gave a new love, in the young John ; and 
to the beloved disciple, suffering more than 
others in the prospect of loss, he gave a new 
affection and care in Mary. That is the very 
secret of comfort, that is the way God often 
gives the oil of joy — it is in new interests 
and new duties that take the thoughts out of 
self into a larger life. 

Richard Baxter testifies that at one period 
of his ministry he was singularly unable to 
comfort his people, his best efforts were in 
vain until he had led them to take an interest 



132 Vital Elements of Preaching 

in the work of the Gospel in other lands. To 
think chiefly of the personal career may be a 
losing game. Our friends pass, our powers 
one by one fail, the story of life is soon told. 
But to turn from these personal and earthly 
concerns to fix the thought on the redeemed 
soul, upon the social good, to lose ourselves 
in the strong, deep currents of the race, this 
is to be endlessly, youthfully happy. 

How can the preacher have this ministry of 
comfort? It must not be sought after for 
itself, but must come springing up out of 
his own life of sympathy. All that makes 
the preacher sensitive, thoughtful, apprecia- 
tive, helpful, will give this element to his 
sermons. 

His own bitter experiences will help him. 
It is difficult for a man to speak comfortingly 
whose veins have always tingled with health, 
who has never seen his most beautiful, earthly 
hope shattered, who has never walked in the 
deep and dark valley of the shadow of death. 
It is often remarked that ministers as a class 
are no strangers to sorrow. There is some 
meaning in the suffering that so many of our 
brothers go through. The best things of our 
lives have come through suffering. What 
we learn in sorrow, we teach in song. "I 
have learned more of the Gospel since my 



The Ministry of Comfort 133 

little boy died/' said Bushnell, "than from 
all the books I have studied." 

The study of men who have been great minis- 
ters of comfort. I mention two such preachers, 
— John Watson for the ministry to special 
cases, and Phillips Brooks for the ministry of 
splendid, inspiring truth. 

In a volume called "The Potter's Wheel" 
Dr. John Watson has written one of the truest 
books of consolation in recent years. They 
are not sermons in form, yet evidently taken 
from sermons, and always characteristic of 
the preacher. Take a single chapter on 
"Broken Homes," where the special purpose 
is to minister to those who have lost young 
children. He discourages the effort to try to 
know too explicitly the reason for such loss, 
and yet he suggests some spiritual ends that 
may be gained through such sorrow. Let us 
remember that we had them for a little while. 
"No little child has ever come from God and 
stayed a brief while in some human home — 
to return again to the Father — without 
making glad that home and leaving behind 
some trace of heaven." 

In many instances death has been a merci- 
ful escape from evils of body or mind. Is it 
not an unconscious and cruel selfishness of 
love that would wish for such a child a pro- 



134 Vital Elements of Preaching 

longed hospital life? There are worse evils 
than pain of body ; and no one can look on 
the innocent face of a little child that has 
fallen on sleep without thanking God for vic- 
tory before the battle. 

"Last night, as my dear babe lay dead, 
In agony I knelt and said : 

God ! What have I done, 
Or in what wise offended Thee, 

That Thou should'st take away from me 
My little son ? 

" Upon the thousand useless lives, 
Upon the guilt that vaunting thrives, 
Thy wrath were better spent ! 
Why should'st Thou take my little son — 
Why should'st Thou vent Thy wrath upon 
This innocent ? 

" Last night, as my dear babe lay dead, 
Before mine eyes the vision spread 
Of things that might have been : 
Licentious riot, cruel strife, 
Forgotten prayers, a wasted life 
Dark red with sin ! 

" Then, with sweet music in the air, 

1 saw another vision there : 
A shepherd in whose keep 

A little lamb, — my little child ! 
Of worldly wisdom undefiled, 
Lay fast asleep ! 



The Ministry of Comfort 135 

" Last night, as my dear babe lay dead, 
In those two messages I read 
A wisdom manifest ; 
And though my arms be childless now, 
I am content — to Him I bow 
Who knoweth best." 

(Eugene Field.) 

Death leaves behind many peaceable fruits 
— a certain seriousness of thought and feeling 
that are not easily learned. Family bereave- 
ment also works a singular and beautiful 
gentleness that can be detected almost with- 
out fail in the expression of the eye — in the 
tone of the voice. And death is a very suc- 
cessful teacher of that faith we all long to 
possess, the conviction of the unseen. "A 
young child with Christ does more to illu- 
minate the other world than all the books that 
ever have been written, and it has often come 
to pass that at the touch of this unseen hand 
hard and sceptical men have arisen and set 
their faces toward God, for the hope of seeing 
again a golden head on which the sun was ever 
shining. " 

Many of the sermons of Phillips Brooks 
have the ministry of comfort in the largest 
sense ; not in special treatment of a particular 
case of sorrow, but in such noble treatment of 
truth and life that the soul is lifted above the 



136 Vital Elements of Preaching 

clouds and the shadows. The Easter sermon 
in the first volume is a good example of this 
generous, positive method, and I close with 
two selections from it. 

"'I am He that liveth.' He declares con- 
tinuous, eternal life. There is a long, large 
life that is not transitory. When we know 
that just as the children's lives set themselves 
into the life of their father which seems to 
them really eternal, just as the leaves, coming 
and going, growing and dropping, find their 
reason and consistency in the long, unchang- 
ing life of the tree on which they grow ; so our 
lives find their place in this long, unchanging 
life of Christ, and lose the vexation of their 
own ever-shifting pasts and futures in the per- 
petual present of His being. A Christ that 
liveth redeems and rescues into His eternity 
the broken, temporary lives and works of His 
disciples." 

"The living Christ, dear friends! the old, 
ever new, ever blessed Easter truth ! He 
liveth : He was dead : He is alive for ever- 
more. Oh that everything dead and formal 
might go out of our creed, out of our life, out 
of our heart to-day ! He is alive ! Do you 
believe it? What are you dreary for, O 
mourner? What are you hesitating for, O 
worker ? What are you fearing death for, O 



The Ministry of Comfort 137 

man ? Oh, if we could only lift up our heads 
and live with Him ; live new lives, live high 
lives, lives of hope and love and holiness, to 
which death should be nothing but the break- 
ing away of the last cloud, and the letting of 
the life out to its completion." 



LECTURE VII. THE CHILDREN'S 
PORTION 

I John 2 : 13. "I have written unto you, little chil- 
dren, because ye know the Father." 



LECTURE VII 

The Children's Portion 

Horace Bushnell thought it a great 
blessing for the preacher to turn from men 
and women with their intricacies and deep 
profundities of sin and unbelief to children 
with their natural faith and their easy 
affinities for goodness. The highest growth 
for the preacher as well as for his faith is in 
the childlike spirit. We have not preached 
well to mature minds because we have not 
learned to preach well to children. And the 
late Dr. Maltbie Babcock, nearly fifty years 
after, gives the same testimony. He felt 
that preaching to children in connection 
with the worship of the Church was the great 
duty and privilege of every pastor. He had 
found the richest recompense in it. He had 
seen the faith and growth of young Chris- 
tians, and he had learned lessons of genuine- 
ness and simplicity and brightness for all 
his public speech. 

We feel that public worship, necessary for 
Christian character, for the maintenance of 

141 



142 Vital Elements of Preaching 

the Church and for its world-wide evangelism, 
is largely a question of habit, and these 
habits must be formed in childhood. The 
Sunday school, sometimes called "the chil- 
dren's church/' can be no substitute for public 
worship. Bishop Vincent, who has done 
more than any living man, perhaps, for the 
improvement of the Sunday school, has 
repeatedly said that if the choice had to be 
made between the Sunday school and the 
worship of the Church, the child should give 
up the school and go to public worship. 
Few thoughtful men will dispute this. 

Children need to be with their parents in 
love for the Church and part in its worship 
and service. The family is as much the 
unit in religion as in society, and cannot 
be separated without serious loss to both. 
Children need to be trained in reverence, 
attention, in desire for spiritual truth, in 
seriousness of thought and purpose, and never 
so much as now. The ideal of the congre- 
gation is all ages and conditions, and for 
this we are to strive, with all reasonable 
and persistent method. How shall the pres- 
ence of the children be gained? I have 
nothing to say about marks and attendance 
cards and prizes. Let those use them who 
think they are of worth. At best, they can 



The Children's Portion 143 

only be the means to an end, and that end 
is the teaching and training of the children 
in the religious life. If children are perma- 
nently a part of the congregation, then they 
must be interested and taught and persuaded 
by the preacher. We must preach to chil- 
dren. How shall this preaching be done ? 

I. Common methods of preaching to children. 

One method is a special children's sermon 
each Sunday morning as a part of the regu- 
lar worship of the Church, and preceding the 
regular sermon. It is a common practice 
in the free churches of England, and followed 
in this country by here and there a pastor. 
It makes extra demands upon the preacher, 
in this country especially hard to meet, and 
might leave a gulf between the two parts of 
the service, the children listless and unfed 
during the service that followed. In fact, 
in some churches the children are allowed to 
go out after their portion is given. 

Another method is a children's service 
once on Sunday (taking the place of a second 
service) or at stated periods, once a month, 
or once a quarter, the whole service devoted 
to them, prayers, hymns, as well as sermon 
being adapted to them. Such a service 
might be had once in three months, the 
morning worship and the Sunday school 



144 Vital Elements of Preaching 

session united, and some truth of the quarter 
be chosen for the message. Such a service 
would not make extra demands upon the 
young preacher, and it would be the best 
training for more frequent preaching of this 
sort. The presence of the congregation 
would give seriousness to the thought and 
preparation. 

In a few churches in this country, the 
Sunday school in the afternoon is closed with 
a short children's service in the church or 
united with the vesper service of the congre- 
gation. In the established churches of Eng- 
land, Scotland, and Germany such a second 
service is common. At the Kreutzer Kirche, 
Dresden, I once attended the most impres- 
sive children's service, the great church being 
rilled with children in classes with their 
teachers, one of the pastors leading and 
speaking, a great chorus of children with 
the organ, no snatchy, worthless jingles for 
tunes, but the worshipful music, a simple 
but noble liturgy, and all the children atten- 
tive and taking part. I did not see a single 
child that was not singing or repeating its 
part. Of course, the discipline of the Ger- 
man home and school is much stricter than 
ours, — the children are used to being drilled. 
But the point is, they were trained in habits 
of worship. 



The Children's Portion 145 

By another method, no special children's 
service or sermon is provided, but a special 
application of the truth to children is given 
at a certain point of the sermon. It might 
be done occasionally with good effect, but 
the habit might interfere with the proper 
development of the sermon. It would be a 
break in the thought, and might lead the 
preacher to the unhappy conclusion that 
now, having met the child's need, he could 
devote the rest of the sermon to the adult 
mind. 

Many pulpits have no regular sermon or 
portion for children, but the effort in every 
sermon is to make truth so simple that any 
bright child may understand. The sermon 
always has the children in view and breathes 
the childlike spirit. The late Joseph Par- 
ker, in spite of his flashes of genius and his 
profound sayings, had such pictorial and 
dramatic elements that he always interested 
children and youth. 

" What did you suffer from ? fear ? Once 
I feared death." Then he pictured a child 
afraid to go to sleep in the dark, but the 
mother's presence took the fear away. 
Christ has suffered death and there is no 
fear now. "You cannot learn to swim by 
standing shivering on the river's brink. 



146 Vital Elements of Preaching 

You must throw yourself into the water, 
as into a mother's arms." " Letters of J. R. 
Green: 'Send me half a crown in stamps. 
I will make half a dozen children happy.' 
That is better than all his history," — such 
are some of the sayings from a single ser- 
mon, bright tales for old and young. 

Simplicity always marks the preaching of 
the Bishop of London. He is not afraid to 
tell a story in the pulpit. It seems a little 
strange at first to hear some lowly tale of the 
East End under the splendid dome of St. 
Paul's, but you soon feel that it gives a reality 
to his message and is in keeping with the very 
spirit of the Master. 

"The other day I went to see one of my 
little friends in a hospital. Jennie had not 
long to live and she was afraid of death. I 
said to her, 'Jennie, you would not be afraid 
if I should come and take you up in my 
arms and carry you to another room?' 
' Oh, no, Sir ! ' ' Well, that is what Jesus 
will do.' And then, the next day, when I 
went to see her, I found that Jesus had come 
for her, and she was not afraid." 

Mr. Campbell of the City Temple is a 
lover of children and often has a word for 
them. A recent account of a sermon on 
Immortality closes with these words : "Noth- 



The Children's Portion 147 

ing was more beautiful than the simple story 
with which the sermon closed. It was the 
story of an only child, loved as only chil- 
dren are. It was her father's custom to 
look into her room the last thing before she 
fell asleep, and always the little voice would 
bid him the same farewell. 'Good night, 
father, I'll see you in the morning.' Sick- 
ness came and the beloved child drew near 
her end. Just at the last, she put her arms 
around her father's neck and said, with fail- 
ing breath, 'Good night, father, I'll see you 
in the morning.' She was right. The little 
child is always right in the spiritual kingdom." 

II. Examples of sermons to children. 

I take examples of children's sermons from 
the English pulpit, where the habit has be- 
come fixed and the best sermons are preached. 
The usual way of preaching to children by 
the free churches is to have a short sermon 
to children — from five to ten minutes, 
closing with a special hymn — come in the 
first part of the service, after the Scripture 
lessons, between the lessons and the pastor's 
prayer. 

This has been the invariable method of 
Dr. Monro Gibson at the St. John's Wood 
Presbyterian Church, London. Sometimes 
Dr. Gibson will preach both sermons him- 



148 Vital Elements of Preaching 

self, sometimes his assistant will preach the 
sermon to the young. I found it the same 
at the Crouch End Congregational Church, 
Dr. Alfred Rowland; the Allen Street Con- 
gregational Chapel, Mr. Silvester Home; 
and the Westbourne Park Chapel, Dr. 
John Clifford. Here are four of the 
strongest Free Churches of London, thor- 
oughly representative, and they all have the 
short children's sermon, preceding the regu- 
lar sermon. We may be certain that they 
have found it helpful, or they would not 
follow the practice. 

Perhaps I can make the matter the clearest 
by giving the substance of three or four of 
these sermons. 

Dr. Clifford's sermon was a parable from 
the seashore. He announced no text at 
first. He pictured a scene and gave its 
spiritual lessons. He had been, during the 
week, at Bournmouth on the South Shore. 
There at ebb tide, on the sandy beach, he 
had seen the seaweed, dry and apparently 
lifeless. But as the tide began to come in — 
these masses of dry weed seemed to be wait- 
ing for the tide — and as the first spray touched 
them, they rose and swelled and drank in 
their life-giving food, the supply of the sea 
they were ready and waiting to receive: 



The Children's Portion 149 

their life came from' the sea. We are life- 
less for higher things without the food of 
God. We must expect and receive the tide 
of divine life. There is a tide of divine life 
upon youth. We must wait and receive : 
be open and filled. 

Here came the text — two verses : " Wait 
on the Lord : Now is the acceptable time." 
Youth is God's time. His influence must be 
received now. The figure of Time with 
forelock, and bald behind, was used. Quo- 
tations from Longfellow and Goethe enriched 
and enforced the truth. And the sermon 
closed with lessons from the mistakes of old 
men, their unreceptiveness, their dried-up 
and wasted power, their lost opportunities. 

The sermon was clear so that children could 
understand, but so strong as to hold the atten- 
tion of every mature mind. And the truth 
had relation to the sermon that followed 
(the whole service had unity) which was 
upon building up the Church, especially the 
use of young lives, drawn from Paul's use 
of Timothy. 

Mr. Silvester Home's sermon to children 
was also connected vitally with the regular 
sermon ; it did not anticipate it, and take 
from it, but when both were spoken, you 
understood the relation. 



150 Vital Elements of Preaching 

The regular sermon was from Romans 
6:14. "Sin shall not have dominion over 
you : for ye are not under law, but under 
grace." Sin to be conquered by grace. The 
children's sermon was from II Corinthians 
12:9. "My grace is sufficient for thee." 
It was developed in the sphere and by illus- 
trations of child life. A child's trouble was 
pictured — some coveted pleasure inter- 
rupted or prevented by accident or weather. 
His friends, say, his parents, "Never mind, 
we'll stay and play with you." And in 
that companionship the loss is more than 
made good. So the Father's grace is his 
great gift. Paul could not do his work as 
he wished, so he prayed. God's answer — 
my grace. I cannot take away the weakness, 
but I will give you grace. The strongest 
thing in the world is the grace of God. And 
this was enforced by illustrations from 
child life. 

Two other sermons may help to show the 
variety of the children's sermon. Mr. A. E. 
Garvie, who was then a pastor, but now has 
a chair of theology in New College, London, 
preached upon the scripture doctrine of 
Immortality, from Psalms 17 : 15. The 
thought of the sermon was that the pledge 
of the future was a righteous life here, and 



The Children's Portion 151 

the form of that future was the likeness to 
Christ. 

The children's sermon was from the pic- 
ture of Christ in the first chapter of Revela- 
tion, the description of Christ in his glory. 
How did Jesus look ? There was no authen- 
tic portrait. Painters had tried to give 
their ideals. Yet there was a certain like- 
ness. Certain things had been handed down 
by tradition, and there was a certain resem- 
blance to the oldest portraits. Hence the 
argument that the outward appearance of 
Christ had been impressed upon his friends 
and handed down by tradition. Pictures 
on grave clothes were in a sense true. It was 
an illustration of the spiritual truth. The 
face of Christ will welcome us. The legend 
of Veronica has a truth in it. If we give 
our lives to Christ, then His own likeness 
will be found in us. If now Jesus in His 
grace is seen by us, then the Jesus of glory. 

Mr. Clow of Glasgow, now Professor of 
Homiletics in the Free Church College, is 
one of the brightest and most enthusiastic 
preachers of that city. He combines the 
scripturalness of the expository method with 
the pictorial and practical power of the 
topical. His sermon to children was from 
Luke 19:21. "I feared thee, because thou 



152 Vital Elements of Preaching 

art an austere man." He spoke of the wrong 
idea that children sometimes get of God, 
thinking of Him simply as a great taskmaster, 
and so disliking Him. And what a different 
idea Christ gave us ! The idea of God and 
its effect upon life was illustrated from a 
child's experience. A boy slept alone and 
on the wall of his room was a text that his 
mother put there: "Thou God seest me." 
And it made him afraid. He had a false 
idea of God, and that great eye seemed to 
peer at him through the dark and keep 
him awake with dread. But the boy became 
a Christian and is to-day a great public 
man. He is now always strengthened by 
the thought of God. And his mother's 
text, which he once so feared, is now on the 
wall of his room, and one of the great com- 
forts of his life. 

Mr. Clow is the only preacher to children 
that I heard who did not connect his chil- 
dren's sermon with the regular sermon of 
the hour. Usually it was a phase of the 
truth, or the preparation for it, or its appli- 
cation to child life. It was not an interrup- 
tion of the service of the hour, but added to 
its unity and fulness of impression. 

The children's sermon did not leave the 
children uninterested and untouched for the 



The Children's Portion 153 

rest of the hour. In every case there was 
something in the main sermon also for the 
children, and the children were attentive 
throughout. Mr. Garvie's sermon was devel- 
oped in its strongest places by illustrations 
from child life. 

I think that the work of preaching to chil- 
dren had its effect upon the preaching of 
all these men. They seemed to be conscious 
throughout that the children were before 
them, and that the minds once interested 
must not be left unfed. The sermons were 
free from abstract and subtle and overrefmed 
trains of thought. They were marked by 
simple, vivid, and practical preaching. 

I asked myself the question why these 
men should preach a separate children's 
sermon? It was so much extra work, and 
if many things in the regular sermon could 
be understood by children and they could 
be brought and interested, why have a sepa- 
rate portion at all? No doubt they knew 
best. The fact that they did so was suffi- 
cient argument in its favour. A children's 
portion would positively attract the chil- 
dren, make them feel their place in the house 
of God, train them to listen to and under- 
stand the preaching, and such preaching 
would be a rare training in simplicity for the 



154 Vital Elements of Preaching 

preacher. We cannot say that they would 
preach so well without the practice for 
children. The children's sermon does not 
prolong the service to weariness, for it does 
not take as much time as the American 
quartette choirs take for anthems and solos 
that often fail to lead the congregation in 
worship, and leave them listening much in 
the spirit of the concert hall. 

The four sermons that I have mentioned 
prove that any man who is called to preach 
at all can also preach to children. They 
differed in nature and interest, but they were 
all worthy children's sermons. The men are 
as varied in gifts as four men could well be. 
Dr. Clifford is a reformer and philosopher of 
life; Mr. Home a platform orator, with 
fondness for historical illustration; Mr. 
Garvie a critical and theological student; 
Mr. Clow is the only one whose general work 
and qualities seem to fit him particularly for 
a children's preacher. Yet all these gifts 
and attainments came into play. The defi- 
nite purpose in each case helped the man to 
accomplish the result. One man described 
a fact of nature, another told the story of a 
man's life, the others, by descriptions of 
familiar experiences, and illustrations of 
child life, made real what is taking place 



The Children's Portion 155 

within the soul. All men alike in their 
effort to make a single picture, leaving the 
impress of a single truth. 

I refer to a single American preacher to 
children, Dr. Charles E. Jefferson of the 
Broadway Tabernacle, New York. It is a 
surprise to find that he is a children's preacher. 
He is a thinker, a student, the chief doctri- 
nal preacher, essentially a preacher to men. 
Yet he has published one of the best vol- 
umes of sermons to children, "My Father's 
Business. " 

I judge he preaches to children only at 
certain seasons, for the book seems to be 
made up of annual sermons. They are so 
simple and pictorial that the youngest child 
in church will be interested to get the mes- 
sage, yet so thoughtful and vital that they 
are almost equally food for mature minds. 

All the sermons of the volume are good. 
Perhaps the first is most characteristic. 
"Line upon line," Isaiah 28:10. He uses 
the very Hebrew words to gain attention. 
The lazy, selfish, drunken people of Samaria 
mock the prophet. "Do you take us for 
children, always speaking the same things 
to us?" "Tsar la tsar, tsar la tsar: quar 
la quar, quar la quar." Boys and girls some- 
times talk and act like these drunkards of 



156 Vital Elements of Preaching 

Samaria, drunk with anger-pride. "Why, 
mother, you have told me that twenty times. 
You are always harping on the same old 
string." 

The theme is, "Why line upon line?" 
and the plan consists of four very plain steps. 

1. They are commanded of God. 

2. In order to get these things into your 

heart, to impress truth and destroy 
evil. 

3. Only a few essentials. As letters of 

the alphabet, figures in numbers, 
tones in music, so only a few laws of 
life. 

4. They see what you do not. 

There will be a worse monotony if you 
fail to heed your parents. Accus- 
ing conscience will say, "Line upon 
line." 
The sermon is strong in its use of scrip- 
ture, and the illustrations of daily life. Take 
a single illustration : 

"It takes a great deal of repetition to get 
a big idea into a small boy's soul. Did you 
ever see a pile driver driving piles? The 
pile driver shoots up into the air a great mass 
of iron, and without a moment's warning 
lets it drop upon the head of the pile. The 
pile does not mind the first blow very much, 



The Children's Portion 157 

and stands almost as proud and tall as ever. 
But the pile driver keeps right on at its work. 
It lifts the iron into the air and lets it drop 
five times, ten times, fifty times, perhaps 
a hundred times, and by and by the pile is 
driven down deep into the river-bed, and is 
so firm and safe that men are not afraid to 
make it part of the foundation of a house. 
Fathers and mothers must drive principles 
into their children's hearts because these 
principles are the piles upon which the house 
of character must be erected. It is for your 
eternal good that precept is placed upon 
precept and line is placed upon line." 

III. Certain deductions as to the children's 
sermon. 

1. The text and theme should be pictorial 
and concrete, — something that will appeal 
to the experience and imagination of the 
child. 
Richard Newton : 

Prov. 30 : 28. " The spider taketh hold 
with her hands, and is 
in King's palaces." 
The spider's example. 
Luke 1 : 15. " He shall be great in the 
sight of the Lord." 
The great man in God's 
sight. 



158 Vital Elements of Preaching 

Ps. 119 : 105. " Thy word is a lamp unto 
my feet." 
The wonderful lamp. 
Jefferson : 

Luke 2 : 46. " Hearing them and asking 
them questions. " 
The duty of asking ques- 
tions. 
Luke 2: 51. "And was subject unto 
them." 
The beauty of obedience. 
Luke 2 : 49. " Wist ye not that I must 
be about my Father's 
business ? " 
My father's business. 
Luke 2 : 52. " And Jesus advanced in 
wisdom and stature and 
in favor with God and 
Man." 
The silent years. 
2. The plan should be clear and simple, a 
very few steps, put in a way to arrest the 
thought and be held in mind. Questions 
are good that may arrest attention and call 
for response. Dr. Richard Newton, the 
prince of children's preachers a generation 
ago, was a master in the art of asking ques- 
tions. His plans were often a series of ques- 
tions, and his style bristled with these marks 



The Children's Portion 159 

of personal inquiry. Dr. Jefferson's plans 
are so simple and inevitable as to be easily 
remembered. 

3. The material should be worthy, not 
simply a string of stories. Respect the mind 
of the child, but remember that imagination 
is the great faculty of youth. So illustra- 
tion will abound, especially such as shall 
cause the child to use his eyes. 

4. The lessons should be unmistakable 
and drawn for the child, not left to inference. 

5. The style should be simple, but not 
childish, on the level of the child, not speak- 
ing down to him. Short words and sentences, 
the best oral style, not linear measure. 

How can we speak well to children? 
We must remember that those who preach 
well to children must know children and love 
children. None so quick as they to tell who 
are their friends, and who understand them. 
They are true spiritual barometers. A man 
who has never had a genuine childhood is 
not fit to preach to children, nor a man who 
has forgotten his childhood. "To lose one's 
love for children, that is a dreadful sort of 
old age," says George Macdonald. 

An admirer of Dr. Clifford's says that the 
secret of his sway over children and youth 



160 Vital Elements of Preaching 

is his resolute belief in Life's unfading charm. 
" Youth believes that the world is young. 
Consequently they gather round a preacher 
who shares their belief. And as he cries in 
their eager, unspoiled ears 'sin is modern, 
love is eternal, 

" ' Grow old along with me ! 
The best is yet to be ! ' 

is it any wonder that so many cleave to him 
in adoring discipleship !" 

Idealism, courage, hope, these are the 
qualities of immortal youth. The man who 
has these may laugh at the years. 



LECTURE VIII. A MAN'S GOSPEL 

I John 2: 14. "I have written unto you, fathers, 
because ye know Him which is from the beginning. 
I have written unto you, young men, because ye are 
strong, and the word of God abideth in you, and ye 
have overcome the evil one." 



LECTURE VIII 
A Man's Gospel 

A Scotch elder once remarked concerning 
three ministers who had served his church : 
"The first was a minister, but not a man; 
the second was a man but not a minister; 
and the third was neither a minister, nor a 
man." If men are to be won to Christ, it 
must be by a manly ministry. Professor 
Mtinsterberg of Harvard in the Atlantic 
(Nov., 1910) says that the strong men of 
the colleges are attracted to business and 
other callings of active leadership and achieve- 
ment, and that the men of less masculine 
qualities, who lack the power of initiative, 
take up teaching and other work of a more 
spiritual nature. 

I do not know how true his generalization, 
but if there is any large degree of truth in it, 
it accounts in part for the small proportion 
of men in the average American congrega- 
tion. It would be a shame to disparage the 
worth and work of woman in the church, 
but a feminine church is not the New Testa- 
163 






164 Vital Elements of Preaching 

ment conception and can never be a conquer- 
ing church. Women and children are easily 
led into faith. Their natures seem more 
sensitive to spiritual truth, and they are 
certainly less exposed to the withering blasts 
of scepticism, or the hardening and corrupt- 
ing forces of the struggle for existence. The 
Gospel has special fitness to men, and makes 
special appeal to them, and the preachers 
who embody it, and present it in its fulness, 
are the ministers to the fathers and to the 
young men. 

1. The preacher must represent a manly 
religion. He must embody its masculine 
qualities. John writes to the young men as 
the strong ones (Xcrxvpoi). It' is equivalent 
to the Latin "vir" — the embodiment of 
manly excellencies — what we mean by 
manliness. Mr. Hughes, writing of the power 
of Charles Kingsley to reach men, noble 
soldiers and writers and men of affairs, said 
that he always presented the manliness of 
Christ, no doubt more or less reflected in 
his own person. 

The preacher must have these qualities 
to reach men. Three qualities you would 
say belong to a manly man, and to a manly 
religion, loyalty, great-heartedness, and up- 
rightness. A manly man will be a seeker of 



A Man's Gospel 165 

truth. He shrinks not from its clearest 
light. He wishes to bring his life and his 
convictions to the fullest light. He will not 
be easily content with conventional views, 
he must prove all things for himself. Once 
convinced of truth, he is loyal to it, he gives 
himself to it. The truth possesses him. 
No plausible sophistries will be suffered to 
blind his vision. No personal allurements 
will turn his feet from its path. 

Men wish magnanimity and tolerance in 
their ministers, but they despise an inverte- 
brate. They know it is a sign of mental or 
moral weakness. To say that a minister is 
on both sides of every question is the charge 
of incompetence, or cowardice. They honour 
a man who believes something and advocates 
it and is willing to suffer for it. They may 
not accept his creed, but they believe in the 
man. And this is the first condition of a 
preacher's work. 

And the second element of a manly reli- 
gion is great-heartedness. The Gospel brings 
its great truths to the heart and profoundly 
moves the lives of men. Let these truths 
get possession of the heart, and the tides 
of feeling pulsate to the extremities of con- 
scious life. Who is the " Great Heart " 
but Jesus, whose life is radiant with Immortal 



166 Vital Elements of Preaching 

Love, who so felt for every man that he got 
under the burdens of the race. 

The intellect is barren until fructified by 
the heart. "We are but shadows, we are 
not endowed with real life till the heart be 
touched. That touch creates us. Then we 
begin to be, thereby we are beings of reality, 
and inheritors of eternity. " (Hawthorne.) 
And Longfellow finely says of the builder 
of the ship : 

"His heart was in his work, 
And the heart giveth grace unto every art." 

The heart feeds the oil in the lamp of all 
high endeavour. The great heart is always 
the element of strength. It is quick to feel 
and quick to respond. It touches others by 
its ready sympathy. It gives birth to enthu- 
siasm and inspires to heroic action. Great- 
heartedness implies large-mindedness, large 
visions of truth and life, power to interpret 
and sympathize with men who differ. It al- 
ways wins men to the person of the preacher. 
And uprightness is the moral foundation 
for spiritual gifts and influences. Without 
this the house is built upon the sand. It 
means self-control of the faculties and pas- 
sions of the body, denying the ungodly lusts 
and obeying the law of purity. It means 



A Man's Gospel 167 

a masterful self-control of the mind, deny- 
ing its vagrant impulses, keeping the facul- 
ties at hard and at times unpleasant tasks, 
that mental power may be developed. It is 
such self-possession for a true purpose, that 
the power of body and mind shall be in true 
harmony, each kept in its proper place, and 
doing its true work. Uprightness is where 
the subjection of all the members of life to a 
wise purpose is the most absolute. And the 
truest freedom is where obedience has be- 
come natural and involuntary. 

It goes without saying that moral integrity 
must characterize a spiritual manhood. Con- 
science will be clear and strong in a true spirit- 
ual ideal. A fine sense of honour will govern 
all the relations of life. 

Ministers, by the mistaken devotion of 
their people, are sometimes shielded from the 
hard knocks of the world, and so they may 
come to feel that they are exceptions to the 
conditions and obligations of the common 
man. It is a fatal mistake that eats out 
the heart of manliness. 

Men especially demand uprightness of 
their minister in three ways. 

A fine sense of honour in all financial 
matters. 

He is supposed to live above mere com- 



168 Vital Elements of Preaching 

mercial law, yet cannot violate it without 
weakness and dishonour. To be eager for 
gain, or to use his position to get things at 
less than their value, is fatal to influence. 
He must live strictly within his income, 
avoid debt as he would the plague, and 
promptly meet his obligation. To most 
ministers it must mean the strictest economy, 
even at times pinching self-denial ; but it is 
the first principle of uprightness, and without 
it a man's influence counts for nothing. 
The spirit of sacrifice must mark the ministry, 
or it utterly fails in its witness and message. 
And the first demand of self-denial may be 
in a life of poverty. Whatever the bestow- 
ment or withholding of worldly means, un- 
questioned honesty and simplicity should 
mark the minister's use of money. One of 
the most brilliant preachers of New England 
was lax in money matters, was not will- 
ing to practise honest self-denial, until the 
trustees were compelled to pay his debts for 
the honour of the church, and compel him 
to pass on. 

Men demand uprightness of the minister 
in all sex-relations. The minister is pecul- 
iarly exposed to sexual temptation and more 
men fail here than from all other causes put 
together. The minister is welcomed into 



A Man's Gospel 169 

the homes and finds himself on familiar terms 
with women. Often the temperament that 
makes him a preacher, the sensitiveness to 
thought and feeling, makes him acceptable 
to the nature of women. He is appreciated 
by them and the feeling easily passes beyond 
admiration. A look of the eye longer than 
wise, a pressure of the hand, an unguarded 
touch, we do not know what volcanic pas- 
sions we may arouse in women and in our- 
selves. Six of our own men have failed here 
in recent years and have passed from sight 
as though they were buried in the sea. 

A manly man will have a chivalric sense 
of honour towards all women, in the case of 
the weak a spirit of deferential courtesy, 
which will throw its charm over all, and be 
likewise an armour of defence. A spiritual 
man will guard against the beginnings of evil, 
the first look or word of careless familiarity. 
The chivalric spirit of Frederick W. Robertson 
gave his boyhood the romantic worship of 
womanhood as its ideal, and gave his man- 
hood that reverence for woman and the 
delicate sense of honour that gained the 
friendship of women without the first taint 
of unholy sentiment. 

Men know instinctively whether a minister 
is careless in his relations to women, and 



170 Vital Elements of Preaching 

they suspect him accordingly. To be known 
as a woman's favourite is the sure way of 
losing the respect of men and of womanly 
women too. 

And then promptness in meeting one's 
engagements. Modern business life means 
order, system, fidelity, despatch, the economy 
of time and strength, and the same spirit 
pervades all successful fife to-day. It must 
characterize the minister's work if he is to 
gain the respect of men. A conscientious 
regard for the work he has taken means 
fidelity in preparation and promptness in 
meeting obligation and opportunity. He 
must be a man of his word. He must live 
the gospel of duty. For him duty must wear 
the " Godhead's most benignant grace." 

To saunter into his pulpit behindhand, 
to be frequently late at his prayer-meeting, 
to be careless in time and work of his many 
church or civic appointments, is often the 
index of loose mental ways, or indifference 
to the convenience of others. In either case, 
it is the result of an undisciplined, unethical 
life. The men of the community can have 
no deep respect for the preacher who causes 
them to suffer from his bad habits. 

It is said of Dr. Alexander Whyte of Edin- 
burgh that he is the busiest man in Scotland 



A Man's Gospel 171 

and the best prepared too. He is always 
at it, and he is always ready when his time 
comes. 

II. The minister must maintain a manly 
relation to men. 

That means that he must try to know them. 
I know there is a natural shrinking from men. 
They are often coarse, careless of speech and 
manner, lacking in respect for religious life, 
misinterpreting the very motive and effort 
of the preacher. All your training and 
tastes and ideals tend to separate you from 
such men. And they will impose a barrier 
from their side. They will very likely feel 
uncomfortable in your presence. The min- 
ister's presence may suggest the life they 
ought to lead, and are not willing to under- 
take. They do not care to have conscience 
uncomfortably active. 

The minister's very presence should be 
the voice of the higher life. That's a beau- 
tiful story told by Mr. Crooker in "The 
Church of To-day," of a shopkeeper who 
said of a certain minister of his city, " When- 
ever he walks by my shop, I say to myself, 
' There goes a true man ' and that moment 
everything good in me feels stronger and I 
find that it is then easier for me to live as I 
ought." 



172 Vital Elements of Preaching 

Of Norman MacLeod of Glasgow, a man's 
minister, a shoemaker said, " He kens leather," 
and a blacksmith said, " When he comes into 
my shop, he talks with me as though he had 
been a blacksmith all his life, but he never 
goes away without leaving Christ in my 
heart." 

We can break through the barriers of men 
by our simple humanity. We have far more 
in common with men than any differences. 
And we can find and assert the common 
tie. Phillips Brooks did this with the men 
of Harvard. The service he rendered his 
Alma Mater as resident preacher was pecul- 
iarly prized by him. It is said that during 
the last service of this kind that he rendered, 
he went one morning into some students' 
rooms, as his wont was. He took in the 
situation at a glance, men who had spent 
the previous night in dissipation, averted 
eyes and pallid faces of men who did not care 
just then to look into their own lives. But 
Bishop Brooks spoke no word of censure to 
them. With his great humanity, his big- 
heartedness, he soon touched matters of 
common interest, the likes of young men, 
the college they all loved so well. But when 
he went out, he said with his deep eyes, and 
heavy tones that seemed to penetrate into 



A Man's Gospel 173 

the very heart of things, "Well, boys, it 
doesn't pay, does it?" And in that presence 
their sin turned black before their eyes. 
They felt ashamed of it. They knew it 
unworthy of their manhood. 

Charles Kingsley knew every man, woman 
and child in his parish. He always found 
some common bond of interest that helped 
him to be a friend and revealed the life to 
him. Edward Everett Hale gave as one of 
the three rules of his own life that he tried 
to rub up against all sorts of men. 

And we must believe in men if we are going 
to be their ministers. We can make no ap- 
peal to men unless we believe in them, be- 
lieve in their capacity for goodness. Front- 
ing the facts of life with open eyes, we must 
still hold to the divineness of life, the noble, 
heroic qualities of the common man, and 
that the majority are not incarnations of 
evil. 

"Through one another — through one another — 
No more the gleam on sea or land — 
But so close that we see the brother — 

And understand, and understand ! 
Till, drawn in swept-crowd closer, closer, 

We see the gleam in the human clod, 
And clerk and foreman, peddler and grocer, 
Are in our family of God." 

(James Oppenheim.) 



174 Vital Elements of Preaching 

Mr. Stokes well says in "A Ministry to 
Men," "The man who would draw back the 
Protestant masses to the church must have 
faith in them. The minister who talks of 
'our immigrant rabble/ who has no confi- 
dence in plain people, will never fill his church 
with wage-earners. Whether we like it or not, 
we are more than blind if we do not see that 
we are living in a democratic age, an age in 
which the people are growing in power, and 
are impatient of domination from ' above.' 
This being true, the minister who wishes the 
common people to hear him gladly, as they 
did Jesus of Nazareth, must have a large 
faith in them." 

"The faculty of seeing things to love in 
individuals and taking them into his personal 
regard is the tap-root of his influence. He 
sways the masses and wins their heart just 
because there are to him no masses" was 
said of Henry Ward Beecher. 

The minister must identify his life with 
the community. He should love his place, 
bearing his burden, rejoicing in its life, 
a citizen first of all. He should love 
his place as Samuel Johnson loved London, 
loved its "central roar," or as Phillips Brooks 
loved Boston. After a summer in Europe, 
the latter looked from his study window over 



A Man's Gospel 175 

the long stretches of tile roofs and exclaimed 
that it was the most beautiful sight in the 
world. It meant home and human lives and 
his work. And that is what your own town 
or city may mean to you, in spite of its 
commonness or ugliness, the most beautiful 
place in the world, because home and friends 
and ministry. "What a dreary view you 
have here, Mr. Ruskin," said a friend one 
day of his London home, " nothing but waste 
water and old junk!" "Oh, I don't feel 
so," replied the great prose-poet, "for when 
I look out, I always see the sky." 

The minister, by his large interests, his 
broad humanity, his public-spirited service, 
can recover the meaning of parson, and make 
men rejoice to recognize him as "our minis- 
ter." 

III. He must preach a manly gospel. 

1. That means a thoughtful gospel. A min- 
ister that is not thoughtful in his work, that 
is not a systematic student of the great prob- 
lems of religion and life, cannot minister to 
the men of the community. They will not 
go to church from force of habit. They will be 
attracted only by a worthy message. It must 
be the best thought of the time on the ques- 
tions of religion. It must appeal to man by 
its reasonableness, in accordance with the 



176 Vital Elements of Preaching 

revealed nature of God and the nature of 
man; a fair, just, balanced view of truth 
and life. I do not see how it is possible to 
present a balanced view of truth and life 
without preaching the Christ in his simplicity 
and fulness. And to preach Christ in any 
real and large way is to preach a manly Gospel. 

It is possible to present the exceptional 
qualities of Jesus, those that make him 
unique, such as purity, love, forgiveness, 
humility, in a non-human way, so that they 
will seem unreal and unrealizable, too good 
for human nature's daily food, unworkable 
in this world where men toil and struggle and 
suffer. 

2. It must have the authority of expert 
knowledge and experience. The preacher 
is a moral and religious teacher. He cannot 
be an authority in everything. It was said 
of Dr. Whewell, who became an English arch- 
bishop, that his foible was omniscience. And 
it is certainly a weakness in the pulpit to go 
beyond the field of religion and morals. 
When any question of work, society, and the 
state rises directly into the moral realm, the 
preacher cannot keep silent without losing 
his power, but he must guard against the 
assumption of an easy omniscience. Nothing 
is so cheap and easy and worthless as words. 



A Man's Gospel 177 

He must guard against partial and ill- 
balanced views. There is the greatest danger 
to-day in an earnest pulpit dabbling in too 
many things. Men will lose respect for our 
word if it is careless and ill-judged and exag- 
gerated. Not without reason does James 
say: "Be not many teachers, my brethren, 
knowing that we shall receive greater judg- 
ment. For in many things we all stumble. 
If any stumbleth not in word the same is a 
perfect man, able to bridle the whole body 
also." (3 : 1-2.) 

3. It must be ethical rather than senti- 
mental, strong more than beautiful, and mak- 
ing its appeal to conscience. This agrees 
with a recent characterization of Dr. George 
A. Gordon: "He is such a combination of 
mind and heart, both in quantity and qual- 
ity, that his emotion and enthusiasm never 
seem sentimental, and his intellectual expres- 
sion never cold." 

4. It must be a Gospel that can be lived, 
practical helps for daily life. And it must 
not fail to present the largeness of the Chris- 
tian life, and lay great obligation upon a 
man's strength. "When the church offers 
a man's job, then it can claim and have a 
man's life." (Pinchot.) 

It is evident that the life of young men is 



178 Vital Elements of Preaching 

full of idealism. That is particularly true 
of college men. "They are quick to respond 
to the claims of Christ.'' And it is true of 
men everywhere. The age is commercial 
rather than materialistic. Men are com- 
pelled to think of the economic basis of life, 
but it is not in the mere getting of things, 
but in their use for man that the zest of life 
consists. 

And the age is full of movements that 
promise a better life, and any movement, 
however idealistic, — visionary, if you will, 
— does not call in vain for recruits. Mr. 
Robert Speer says that the way to reach 
young men is to appeal to the heroic, and the 
work of the Student Volunteer movement, 
and the Y. M. C. A. in its foreign work, is 
shining proof of the truth. They do not 
need to call a second time for any work that 
needs a man's energy and devotion. Once 
at Harvard, Dr. Grenfell called for four 
volunteers for his summer work in Labrador, 
and he had the men before he left the 
room. 

Here, I take it, is a good lesson in psy- 
chology for the preacher who would reach 
the men of his community with the Gospel. 
Is it not to preach a Gospel that demands the 
whole man, and all a man can do? "A 



A Man's Gospel 179 

man's job" — that's the natural expression 
of a man. The energy of large use, the 
achievement of efficiency is the mark of life 
everywhere. Every man desires three things 
by virtue of his manhood. 

A proper self-expression — you hear the 
common term to-day of self-realization; 

The proper use of his powers and so a 
worthy achievement ; 

And the adequate reward of his labours, 
or the appreciation of his life. 

I think it is our business in preaching to 
help men to see that the greatest things are 
not the visible and material, and that the 
deep desires of a man's heart can only be 
realized by a life of Christian faith and devo- 
tion. Christian faith brings out the noblest 
expression of the man. In fact, Christianity 
may be called God's way of making a man. 
Henry Drummond taught us to think of 
Christianity in this way — not as some- 
thing imposed upon us, but exactly fitted to 
our nature and necessary to its completest 
development and use. And it makes all 
the difference with the man whether his 
powers are used for some personal and selfish 
end, or for the highest good of others as seen 
in the kingdom of God. And the highest 
honour of life is to have a part in that king- 



180 Vital Elements of Preaching 

dom into which the very nations shall at 
last bring their glory. 

It is a practical demand of men to have a 
work that is worth while. It is inevitable 
that they should test our gospel by its use 
for the largest life. In this respect the 
claim of pragmatism is just and convincing. 

The devotional test which the pulpit 
sometimes lays upon men is not true enough 
or large enough for the whole of life. You 
might just as well draw a regiment of soldiers 
around the Church to keep men out, as ask 
them to subscribe to certain creed statements, 
or publicly talk about their religious experi- 
ence, or lead the devotions of men. However 
valuable these acts are for certain men, they 
cannot be imposed as a test of faith, or the 
necessary means of its growth. It is an age 
of action, but an age growingly reticent about 
its deepest feelings. 

I think we should preach the Gospel so 
that its ethical demands shall rest upon the 
conscience of men. It is to permeate all 
life, and to govern and sanctify all its rela- 
tions and activities. And this must mean a 
social Gospel. Christ must be made a master 
of all men. He must not be shut out of any 
haunt or sphere of man. 



A Man's Gospel 181 

" This is the Gospel of labor, — ring it, ye bells of the 

kirk — 
The Lord of Love came down from above, to live with 

the men who work." 

(van Dyke, "The Toiling of Felix.") 

And the men who hear this Gospel and 
catch its note of humanity and brotherhood 
cannot live for themselves, but must do their 
part towards a better race and a happier 
earth. This is the vision of the Kingdom of 
God which makes the loudest call to the men 
of our age, and which our age specially needs. 
The preacher who puts his truth in the ethi- 
cal and social form of the Kingdom of God 
makes the noblest appeal. It was Christ's 
distinctive message and his great imperative : 
"Let the dead bury their dead, but go thou 
and preach the Kingdom of God." 

Such a pulpit has a manly message for a 
world of men. The words of Kipling apply 
to the preacher, as well as to every genuine 
toiler, 

"Go to your work and be strong, halting not in your 

ways, 
Balking the end half-won, for an instant dole of praise. 
Stand to your work and be wise, certain of word and pen, 
Who are neither children nor Gods, but men in a world 

of men.'' 



LECTURE IX. THE PREACHER'S 
GROWTH 

Isaiah 40 : 4. " He wakeneth my ear to hear as they 
that are taught." 



LECTURE IX 

The Preacher's Growth 

Growth is the law of life. Every living 
thing grows. When growth stops, death 
begins. Man is higher than other earthly- 
life in the power of his growth. He has the 
power of an ever unfolding, expanding, end- 
less life. 

"Finds progress man's distinctive mark, 

Not God's and not the beast's : God is, alone, they are. 

Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be." 

(" A Death in the Desert.") 

A live preacher should be a shining example 
of the law of growth. 

The age demands this growth in the 
preacher. He cannot be an exception to the 
condition of success. Its enterprise, its 
struggle, its hope of mastery, call for a grow- 
ing life. It sounds the note of efficiency. 
It calls for an increasing mastery of the 
powers and materials of work. It is ever 
calling for the vision and courage and energy 
of youth. It is seemingly ruthless in its 
treatment of weakness and neglect. " Take 
185 



186 Vital Elements of Preaching 

the talent from him, and give it to him that 
hath ten talents' ' is the inevitable judgment 
upon the man that fails to grow. The dead 
line, the arrest of growth, wherever reached, 
is a bar to usefulness. 

The charm of a young minister, the demand 
for young men in the churches, is in large 
part the promise of growth. He is to be 
a stronger, wiser, better man, and all the 
forces of the Church are to develop under 
the leadership of his expanding, enriching 
life. He has the potency and promise of 
success. 

And the very message of the preacher is 
the gospel of the new man. Christianity is 
full of personal and social hope. It is ever 
calling to the possible man, that the man 
that is to be may arise and hear God's voice 
and enter into the life of a son. The Gospel 
demands and gives a growing life. The per- 
sonality of Christ is the quickening and uni- 
fying force for the individual and the race. 
A stagnant minister is a denial of the power 
of the Gospel. 

The best work of the preacher is con- 
ditioned by his growth and gives incentive 
to it. He must be a wise householder that 
bringeth forth things new and old from his 
treasury. There are but few principles of 



The Preacher's Growth 187 

religion and those need endless iteration; 
but only a growing soul can repeat them so 
as to form a literature of spiritual power. 
Truth is not a discovery made once for all, 
stored up to be used at demand. But truth 
is a life never fully attained, ever struggling 
and learning, ever seeing and doing more 
because of its growth. 

It is growth that sustains the ideal, the 
vision of what ought to be and what can be 
by the grace of God. It does not suffer the 
soul to rest in any comfortable and low 
content. A living message, the truth for 
to-day, and not the scribe's dull repetitions 
of yesterday, must be the word of a life that 
is ever learning. 

And the true preacher finds in the very 
conditions of his work the greatest incentive 
to growth. He seeks for permanent re- 
lations with men. He is not like the teacher 
who must give the same lessons to changing 
classes. He is not like the evangelist who 
repeats the same truth to different communi- 
ties. Such men may find little growth in 
their work, and it is almost a miracle if they 
escape mental hardness and sterility. But 
the true preacher moves on with his class. 
He ministers to the same lives in childhood 
and youth, in manhood and old age. There 



188 Vital Elements of Preaching 

must be the growing truth to feed the growing 
life. He cannot be the spiritual leader of a 
generation, making a wholesome impression 
upon the community, giving fruitful life 
to all that he touches, without that vitality 
of faith that comes from an increasing un- 
derstanding and appropriation of the truth. 
To build the church means to build the 
preacher. 

The hindrances to the preacher's growth 
are many and subtle. They lie in the very 
nature of the man and his work. The pulpit, 
with other so-called learned professions, is 
naturally, perhaps necessarily, conservative. 
The lawyer deals with statutes and prece- 
dents, and seeks to guard what has been 
gained. The doctor is under the power of 
great examples, but deals with material 
of nature and life that is ever open to new 
interpretation. The preacher has an his- 
toric faith, deals with a body of truth, often 
put in great creedal forms, and is inclined 
to study the past and rest upon what has been 
found. 

The pulpit has a strong tendency to mental 
and moral fixedness. Amid the shifting and 
passing persons and opinions of earth is 
the abiding word, and the preacher too 
easily identifies his personal creed and work 



The Preacher's Growth 189 

with the unchanging and the eternal. The 
Christian pulpit is rightly conservative of 
what is true and best, but it is fatal to 
character and power to make this a bar to 
progress. 

We must repeat simple and fundamental 
truths; men will always need to be taught 
the elemental things of faith, and this fact 
may tend to a routine that has no vision, no 
joy of first discovery. There are men who 
repeat the truths they have been taught, 
who never find for themselves, who simply 
receive, who have not the hunger of the 
seeker, to whom the world is never new. 
They are the pessimists of the routine. 
"That which hath been is that which shall 
be; and that which hath been done is that 
which shall be done; and there is no new 
thing under the sun." (Eccl. 1 : 9.) 

And yet, there never was such possibil- 
ity of spiritual progress. This is the age of 
vision. The philosophies, born of new 
sciences, a larger study of religion, a finer 
sense of responsibility, born of the social 
consciousness, are bringing to men new views 
of truth and duty. Every day sheds its 
new light upon the world, and at night God 
flings his visions across the skies. 

The word of God, in its more vital inter- 



190 Vital Elements of Preaching 

pretation, the unfolding of our own nature, 
bringing to every man insistent questions, 
the movements of thought and life that often 
have such far-reaching and radical intent, 
the stirrings of nations, breaking the bars 
of isolation and intolerance, and throwing 
wide open the doors of opportunity, — all 
bring their visions. And yet the preacher 
may be so under the power of routine as 
to see little or nothing of all this. I have 
seen a man in the heart of a great empire, 
just awakening to the sense of race-con- 
sciousness, the new social and moral ideals all 
around him fairly seething with new life 
and calling for leadership and expression, — 
as dull and dead to all this — a blind mole 
lost in the minutiae of his work — as though 
he were hid away in the most isolated corner 
of America. The forces of his work and 
the very laws of habit may make the preacher 
a man with a closed mind. Where there is 
no open vision, the prophet's voice is not 
heard and the people perish. 

Then the preacher may easily be lost in the 
details of his work. The modern church is 
so highly organized that he may forget his 
great mission in visitings and circulars and 
clubs. He may be the busiest man in town 
and yet leave his first task unfulfilled. There 



The Preacher's Growth 191 

may be growth in social management, but 
not in the intellectual and spiritual power 
of a Christian teacher, and leader. Plans 
of self-training may yield to the pressure of 
secondary demands. There may be no hard, 
consecutive work on the things that make 
the preacher. 

" Preaching is your highest business. Noth- 
ing can ever take its place. You are to be 
administrators, but administration will not 
fill the place of preaching. Unless you are 
preachers, you are not likely to have much 
to administer. You are to be organizers, 
but the organizing gift will never compensate 
for the lack of the gift of preaching. Men 
who cannot preach have ordinarily little to 
organize. When you see a man at the head 
of a large and living church, displaying large 
gifts of organization and administration, 
do not suppose that these are the gifts by 
which his church came into being, or which 
keep it glad and strong. He or some one 
else created it by preaching. Unless a man 
knows how to present truth in such a way 
as to get it into the blood of those who hear 
him, he need never hope for a living, growing, 
conquering church, no matter what other 
gifts he may be possessed of." (Jefferson, 
" Building the Church," page 279.) 



192 Vital Elements of Preaching 

The preacher's life goes into his word. 
Virtue goes out of him at every vital message. 
There can be no cautious withholding if 
faith is to be communicated to men. All 
the treasures of life, the deepest and fullest 
personality, must be imparted by the preacher 
who makes the Gospel a living word. 

It is the costliest expenditure known to 
man. No wonder that the candle of life 
burns low and the pulpit sometimes gives 
a feeble and flickering light. No wonder 
that the fountain of life is drained and the 
sermon is like a brook with only stagnant 
pools. The body must be full of light. 
There must be a well of water within ever 
springing up. The gathering must be as 
rich and constant as the spending. Life 
must be kept at the full if the pulpit is to be 
real and vital and commanding. The preacher 
must aim at the full-grown man, through 
the ever increasing process of intellectual 
and spiritual culture. 

The social, sympathetic side of many a 
preacher has been his undoing. He has not 
had the courage and resolution to face the 
lonely tasks of study and meditation, the 
patient and thorough processes of large prep- 
aration. An agreeable or lazy good nature 
has taken the easiest course, has shirked the 



The Preacher's Growth 193 

discipline of the prophet. There has not 
been the large prevision for himself and his 
church, looking through the years, not the 
purpose for growth and service that holds 
its way, cuts its way through whatever 
obstacles. Life has lost the force and rush 
of the mountain stream, and now takes its 
sluggish and meandering way through the 
alluvial of the plain. 

"What is the matter with your friend? 
He does not grow, he has not fulfilled the 
promise of his youth," was said concerning 
a minister of marked gifts and lovable nature. 
"Oh," was the reply, "he spends too much 
time, too many morning hours, on dry-goods 
boxes." 

The very temperament that makes the 
preacher may keep him from the highest and 
best of which he is capable. The artistic 
nature, the sensitiveness that responds to 
the environment, may not always find in his 
hearers the tastes and demands of spiritual 
and enduring work. It may not be popular 
to be thoughtful and thorough. It may bring 
quicker and larger returns to be sensational 
and shallow. The people may not wish the 
preacher to bring them the fruit from the 
very highest boughs of the tree of life. Shall 
the preacher simply meet the popular de- 



194 Vital Elements of Preaching 

mand, be "unto them as a very lovely song 
of one that hath a pleasant voice/ ' or shall 
he try to awaken the deeper hunger of the 
soul and satisfy it ? In all his work shall he 
build after the pattern in the mount? 
Shall he be strenuous of this higher reward, 
though the world be adverse to desert ? 

"There are no more subtle or powerful 
temptations in the modern world than those 
which beset the oratorical temperament, 
face to face with the swift judgments and 
imperative demands of a great popular 
audience. Let each one of us look about him 
and see that the gravest tragedies of the 
pulpit are not those of men who have lost 
their places, but those of men who have kept 
them by descending in spirit." (Fatjnce, 
"Educational Ideals of the Ministry, " page 
262.) 

When Robert W. Dale became the pastor 
of Carr's Lane Chapel, Birmingham, in suc- 
cession to Henry Angell James, he began to 
preach carefully prepared expository sermons, 
as the best form for himself and his people. 
He was met one day by a minister of much 
experience and power, of the fervent type, 
who said to him, "I hear you are preaching 
expository sermons to Carr's Lane; they 
won't stand it." "They will have to stand 



The Preacher's Growth 195 

it," was the determined reply of young Dale. 
The reply was not arrogant and dogmatic, 
but a glimpse of the noble plan of work 
which would take the whole man and years 
of consecutive service, and which gave the 
promise of the richest returns in character 
and service. It is possible that Dr. Dale 
might have been a more popular preacher, 
but it is hard to see how he could have been 
truer to a nobler conception of his office, or 
how he could have served the church and 
generation better. 

In what direction should the preacher strive 
to grow f 

He should grow in the knowledge of his 
speciality, the religious truth and life of men. 
He is the forthteller for God, an interpreter 
and teacher of the spiritual life. Influence 
he has from his position and Church and 
Bible, but his real authority must spring from 
his recognized knowledge and character. 
Men must never say, "He talks easily of the 
greatest truths, of which he knows no more 
than the rest of us," — he is to be an expert 
in his work, an expert of the Christian re- 
ligion, whatever interprets the Bible and 
other religions as they throw light upon 
Christianity, and the religious experience of 
men. 



196 Vital Elements of Preaching 

There must be a growing perception of 
truth, and a growing appropriation of it for 
the prophetic spirit. There can be no 
spiritual leadership without this — the read- 
ing of the hearts of men, the understanding 
of their difficulties, and the ministering of 
the divine life to them. Every man is a 
part of his age ; the age forms the problems 
of the religious life. And the growing inter- 
pretation of truth is the effort to incorporate 
Christianity in the life of each age. Truth 
is the same, but the conception of it must 
grow, if it is to be living and life-giving. A 
man's faith is not a child's faith, though one 
will grow out of the other. Paul felt so, — 
when he became a man, he put away childish 
things; and in any life where religion is 
supreme, faith has been an attainment. 

Dr. Clarke closes his " Sixty Years with 
the Bible" with a beautiful confession as to 
the growth of his Christian life. "I might 
have tried to live until now upon the ideas 
of the Bible and of God to which I had 
attained at the end of the fifties of the nine- 
teenth century, true ideas and not unworthy 
then, but too small, too unreasoned, too 
ill-supported, too unspiritual, for the needs 
of my later years; and I was glad that I 
could say to God and to my own soul that 



The Preacher's Growth 197 

I had spent the lifetime of a man in enlarg- 
ing, deepening, and correcting the ideas that 
as a child I had received, and in seeking better 
foundation for a better faith. " 

The preacher should grow in his fellowship 
with men. 

Friendship is the key of life. It unlocks 
the closed doors of indifference and prej- 
udice. Life should lie open ever wider and 
wider in its interests and relations. Many 
a preacher stands in an ever narrowing world. 
His professionalism or eccentricity leave the 
mass of men untouched. His lack of magna- 
nimity and his narrow interests make a cell 
of life and not a hospitable mansion. To be 
a friend of man is the highest ideal for any 
life. 

Robertson was the master of the spiritual 
capacities because he was able to put himself 
in the place of others. " He was thus enabled 
to reveal men to themselves, to tell them what 
their life meant, and how to idealize it and 
ennoble it ; to draw out in them what was 
best and highest ; and all this with a gracious 
tact, due also to his sensitiveness, which 
seldom did too little, and never went too far." 

Henry Drummond, who was a prophet 
to the young men of his day, had a genius 
for friendship. And Dr. John Watson, who 



198 Vital Elements of Preaching 

interpreted the Gospel in the terms of the 
widest human interest, overflowed with hu- 
manity. It was said of his university days, 
" Wherever you put him down, he will be 
a friend to the man at his elbow.' ' 

The preacher should grow in spiritual wis- 
dom, the power to interpret life and minister to 
it aright. 

Every man makes mistakes, he must serve 
his apprenticeship, but the years should 
bring the fruits of ripened experience. It is 
a great tribute to a man to say that he speaks 
the fitting word and does the right thing. 
It means the growth of gentleness and large- 
mindedness, of sacrificial love and of a far- 
seeing faith. 

The preacher should grow in instructive, 
persuasive speech. 

Art is long, and preaching is the longest and 
hardest of all arts. It does not come of 
fluent speech. It may be a fatal hindrance 
to the highest use. Life must be rich, if 
speech is to be of worth. The training of 
life comes to fruit in the words of our lips. 
The best speech is only approximate in the 
expression of truth. And how can we put 
the great thoughts of God into our rough 
moulds ! The exhortation of St. James 
might be oftener repeated, "Be not many 



The Preacher's Growth 199 

teachers !" But it is our business to preach, 
to speak better, to gain increased mastery 
of the most wonderful instrument of life, 
to honour the word. 

How shall the preacher's growth be gained f 
It can never be gained save by planning 
for it. Growth will come through service, a 
live preacher will be trained by his calling; 
but even the service will decline without the 
systematic enrichment of life. The ceaseless 
giving of the preacher demands a ceaseless 
getting. How often a minister's library tells 
the story of his life ! The books of college 
and seminary days, when his intellectual 
life was under guidance, a few books of 
popular fiction, a few current magazines and 
a church paper or two, — a scanty record of 
weekly thinking. The strong new books 
are not there, the new light upon the Bible, 
the modern interpretations of great truths 
and of the life of the age, the records of 
dynamic movements. A preacher must be 
alive to his fingertips, if he is to minister to 
an age like ours. 

No man should enter upon his church year 
without a plan that shall in a large sense 
cover his private study and his public teach- 
ing. There is no planless growth. There 
is no strength of the Church that is not 



200 Vital Elements of Preaching 

built up step by step. The plan will save 
life from being broken into unrelated frag- 
ments, from being squandered in useless 
trifles. It means a large vision of life, the 
redemption of its time, the vitalizing of its 
powers, the worthy accretion of the material 
and sense of message. 

"The preacher can plan his studies in 
theology, history, biography, and poetry, — 
four branches indispensable to a man who 
wishes to be a master-teacher of men. Cer- 
tain subjects will be assigned to each of the 
years, and certain volumes will be set apart 
for each of the months, and no sort of con- 
spiracy on the part of men or devils will be 
allowed to break down the minister's de- 
termination to pursue the prearranged course 
to its end. Desultory reading and spasmodic 
study have slain their thousands. A man 
who forms a clean-cut plan and clings to it 
heroically through the oppositions of the 
years is a man who advances in wisdom and 
in stature and in favour with God and men." 
(Jefferson, "The Building of the Church," 
page 264.) 

The phrase "a good mixer" may stand for 
a cheap and superficial kind of minister, 
but it voices a demand for the knowledge of 
life that can come only from a sympathetic 



The Preacher's Growth 201 

contact. The many current discussions, such 
as Mr. Francis Leupp's, in a recent Atlantic, 
are not always intelligent criticisms of present 
theological training, but they rightly insist 
that the preacher must be trained as a man 
of humanity and not a man of a class. Not 
only his duties, but his recreations, should 
bring him close to the haunts and bosoms 
of men. He should make a cult of friendship. 
For the sake of his own manhood he needs 
to grow in heart-lif e, to grow in sympathy and 
appreciation and hopefulness, in all that will 
strengthen his kinship with men. 

And then the preacher must love his calling 
above every other, rejoice that he is alive, 
with such opportunities of loving service 
and growing speech. He would be nowhere 
else and do nothing else in the world. He 
would cherish all the high traditions of his 
profession and eagerly use the means for 
a nobler message and a more winning speech. 
The preacher must be alive if he would 
be the interpreter and transmitter of a living 
word. Like his master, he comes that men 
may have life and have it abundantly. Only 
as he is open to the messages of God, only 
as the life of humanity sweeps through his 
own being, can he voice the meaning of God 
and lead men into the fulness of life. 



202 Vital Elements of Preaching 

Such a preacher will never grow old. 
Life will have its unfading interest and charm. 
Truth will never lose its wonder. The work 
of helping men into a better life will never 
grow dull. He will have the abiding spirit 
of youth. He will bring forth fruit in old 
age. It would be well if we talked less of the 
dead line of the ministry, and thought more 
of the power of an endless growth. Mr. 
De Morgan, the English artist and novelist, 
wrote "Joseph Vance " at sixty-seven, and 
began a new day for the English novel. Our 
Dr. Weir Mitchell, the eminent physician and 
writer of Philadelphia, kept adding to our 
delight in story and poem as though he were 
a man of forty. And Alexander Maclaren 
was still a matchless preacher at eighty-two. 

"Grow old along with me, 
The best is yet to be, 

The last of life for which the first was made. 
Our times are in his hand, 
Who saith, 'A whole I planned, 
Youth shows but half; trust God; see all, nor be 
afraid I'll 



LECTURE X. THE PREACHER 
AND HIS AGE. TIMELINESS 

I Cor. 9 : 22. "I am become all things to all men 
that I may by all means save some." 

Rom. 12:2. "And be not fashioned according to 
this age. 



LECTURE X 
The Preacher and His Age 

" Dangerous or not, I will preach it. 
Twenty and two years have I seen truth 
made of no effect by trying to suit it to cir- 
cumstances. I will have none of it. I will 
make myself all things to all men ; but I will 
keep truth the same, immutable and eternal." 
(Charles Kingsley.) 

"The preacher should be the child of his 
age. The atmosphere which he breathes is 
that of the age in which he has been born. 
He is the son of that special epoch. He owes 
it reverence, but he does not owe it, nor any 
age, servile homage or thoughtless flattery. 
Reverence the age in which you live, but do 
not dread it. Yield it the homage which 
all those born in it are bound to give it, but 
do not be enslaved by it. To put this in 
another form, you must be in your age, but 
you must not be wholly of it. Recognize 
that you are the child of your age. Resolve 
not to be its slave." (Bishop Boyd-Car- 
penter.) 

The two quotations from Paul and the 

205 



206 Vital Elements of Preaching 

words of Charles Kingsley and Dr. Boyd- 
Carpenter present the seeming contradic- 
tions of preaching to one's age, — the timely 
and the eternal elements of the Gospel. 
The preacher is to be in the world, yet not of 
it ; child of his age, understanding it, sympa- 
thizing with it, speaking its language ; fitting 
his message to its deepest need; its real 
leader and teacher, — yet above his age, so 
that he shall see the long past from which 
the life and truth of his age have come, and 
able to see the better age to be, and work for 
its better realization ; and able to present the 
life that shall be the divine answer to every 
age, Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, to-day, 
and forever, "the eternal contemporary " 
of the race. I wish to take up these thoughts 
one by one. 

I. We are children of the age. We draw 
our nourishment from the soil of our age; 
we breathe the atmosphere of our age. In 
a very real sense we are what the age makes 
us. We cannot separate ourselves from the 
life of our time. The age ? What is it ? 
This composite, this present expression of 
manifold persons and forces, this intangible, 
yet all-pervasive spirit of the air. It gives 
us our ideas, it shapes our habits, it offers our 
opportunities. 



The Preacher and His Age 207 

II. And we must understand our age. It 
is close to us — the very air we breathe — 
and we are a part of it ; and this very close- 
ness, this vital inseparable relation, may make 
it hard for us to understand our age. It is 
hard to objectify it. It is hard to get out 
of its smoke and its dust, to look at it with 
our reasons and not with our prejudices. It 
may be easier to know the age of Calvin than 
that of Moody or Phillips Brooks, to analyze 
the doctrines of the Westminster Confession 
than to understand the real belief of men 
about us. The one may be found and studied 
in authoritative books ; the other takes the 
sympathetic heart and the slow impress of 
long and patient brooding and fellowship. 

I once went with a small boy to the Central 
Park Zoo in New York. Like nearly all 
boys of his age, he was intensely interested 
in animals, and a more animated and happy 
boy it would have been hard to find. After 
several hours it was hard to get him away 
from the cages of the animals. 

The next day we went to Boston and while 
there visited the Peabody Museum at Har- 
vard, and here was a larger world of animals, 
but all lifeless and fixed, the record chiefly 
of the past. The boy was absolutely lost 
in wonder. He dwelt in fairyland. And 



208 Vital Elements of Preaching 

at the end of the day I said to him, " Which 
do you like better, the Central Park Zoo or 
the Peabody Museum ?" I confess to a great 
surprise at the answer. Instantly he said : 
"The Peabody Museum. The animals are 
fixed, you know, so that you can really see 
them." 

The past has become fixed in some great 
forms so that we may study and know them. 
The present is in motion, swift and ceaseless 
as a weaver's shuttle, and we do not always 
know the pattern we are weaving. 

To know the age in the sense of knowing 
the men and women of the age, and in that 
larger sense of knowing the environment of 
life; the theories and hopes that form the 
ideals of men, the spirit that controls their 
actions ; the social and industrial and moral 
forces that make the work and life of men ; 
— this is the interpreter's call and difficulty. 
We must try to know man as the individual 
and man as a part of present-day humanity, 
if we are to preach to our age. 

III. And we must appreciate the life and 
truth of our age. It is easy to fail here. We 
may easily be the critic of our age ; it is the 
severest and noblest task to be the interpreter 
of the age. Our studies may glorify the past. 
The men and institutions may seem large 



The Preacher and His Age 209 

in the distant haze, as the features of a 
landscape. Or the visions of the future may 
so shine in our eyes that we shall be almost 
blind to the life in which we move. We 
may think of its crudeness and failures, its 
littleness and unbelief. 

I do not believe any man can help his age 
unless he rejoices in it, unless he sees the 
forces for good and strengthens them, unless 
he believes in the noble possibilities and calls 
them forth. To be honest and fearless critics 
is often our painful duty, but the pessimist 
is powerless to help. A man must believe 
in his age, if he is to speak to its heart. 
The Christian optimist is the wisest leader. 

Dr. John Owen, the Puritan, was a great 
theologian and he thought profoundly upon 
the truths that were emphasized by Puritan 
theology. But he was as profoundly ignorant 
of his own age and called the philosophy of 
Sir Isaac Newton fatal to the authority of 
Scripture. How many times have Christian 
teachers repeated the folly of the council 
that condemned Galileo ! Dr. Hitchcock of 
Amherst was thought an enemy of religion 
because he found the bird-tracks in the Con- 
necticut limestone and argued long, pro- 
gressive ages of creation. Horace Bushnell 
was denied Christian standing because he 



210 Vital Elements of Preaching 

saw the spirit of God working in other ways 
than the traditional ones of the Church ; viz. 
in the quiet, pervasive process of the home 
and the school. One of our churches was 
closed to Professor George Adam Smith 
because the officers heard that he was a 
higher critic. A professor of a western 
university, who was also an officer of a church, 
asked for the name of a minister who would 
not take every occasion to denounce the 
theory of evolution as atheistic. 

It is the greatest blunder to think that 
every movement of thought is hostile to 
faith. It is intellectual and spiritual myopia. 
The same faith which wrote the great con- 
fessions is busy to-day on mission fields, 
in hospitals and schools, in industrial better- 
ment and social righteousness. The very- 
interest in this earth, the passion for knowl- 
edge and possession and pleasure is the 
craving of man for a higher life and may be 
turned in the end to the accretion of faith. 
The new light that critical and historical 
study has brought to the Bible, the new light 
in which scientific thought regards nature 
and man, is not of the Evil One. To say 
that the Devil was the first higher critic 
solves no problem, sheds no new light. We 
believe in the living Lord, if our faith is more 



The Preacher and His Age 211 

valuable than the pride of opinion. His 
spirit cannot be shut up to those who teach 
certain approved opinions. He is the spirit 
of all true work, of all that shall add to the 
knowledge and well-being of man. "He 
is the light that lighteth every man that 
cometh into the world." What is true in 
nature is just as true as that which is true in 
religion. And both are the word of God. If 
evolution is the best working hypothesis of 
life, then it should furnish the strongest helps 
to faith. We can see that last of all he sent 
his son, and that the future of the sons of 
God is the development of the spiritual 
principle of life. 

"It is the office of science to discover truth ; 
it is the function of the Church to make all 
facts live in the lives of men. The one 
illuminates the face of nature; the other 
vitalizes human hearts with ethical motives. 
Therefore, the more truth scientific discovery 
may present to the world, the greater the 
need of the Church to make this truth ef- 
fective and productive in human character. 
The swifter the progress of knowledge, the 
larger the necessity and the opportunity of 
the minister. 

" Probably one of the chief reasons of the 
present weakness of the Church is the fact 



212 Vital Elements of Preaching 

that so many ministers have not come out 
into the real modern world and laid hold of 
its vast resources and applied them to human 
life, in behalf of piety and morality as ought 
to have been done. Overburdened with 
fading traditions and fettered by archaic 
forms, clergymen have often spoken in feeble 
and flattering tones, when in fact the world 
is full of newly discovered truths that reveal 
God more fully than ever before, and that 
ought to have been used to enforce moral 
law. The permanent duty of the Church is 
to transform truth into life, and the present 
increase of knowledge enlarges this duty." 
(Ckooker, "The Church of To-day," page 
138.) 

The social idealism to-day that demands 
a restatement of truth is the work of Christian 
love. Many good men fear the movements 
of democracy. They regard the voice of 
the people as a demon, not the voice of God. 
But, in spite of many harsh and discordant 
cries, we must believe, as we believe in the 
living God, that the spirit that regards the 
humblest man as of worth, and is trying to 
write this into the law of the nations, giving 
to every life a chance for use and growth and 
joy, is from him who so loved men that he 
gave himself for them. " Every one that 



The Preacher and His Age 213 

loveth knoweth God." And surely the spirit 
of humanity, the social consciousness, the 
most distinct mark of our generation, will 
give the Church a more adequate conception 
of redeeming love, and make the Church a 
mightier force for the kingdom, whose very 
law is love, the filial spirit towards God and 
the fraternal spirit towards men. The sense 
of imperfect life, the desire to help, the prac- 
tical love, is bound to express Christian 
truth in terms of life. 

IV. We must speak the language of the 
age. It is easy for religion to have a speech 
of its own apart from the language of life. 
It comes from the historic nature of the Gospel, 
its truths given definite expression and handed 
down through successive stages of creedal 
form. And all men who do certain things 
belonging to their work become accustomed 
to doing them in a more or less fixed way. 
They move in ruts or grooves of thought and 
speech, and in so far as this is so, it may be- 
come a lifeless thing. We have all heard 
Christian truth spoken in such a way that 
it seemed a far-away echo. 

We must speak in the language of the age 
if men are to understand us. It must be as 
real as farms and factories, as business and 
politics. The power of Mr. Finney's preach- 



214 Vital Elements of Preaching 

ing was that he threw away the theological 
terms and the formal methods of the preachers 
of his time and clothed the Gospel truths 
in the garments of present life. And Mr. 
Beecher did the same. All life mirrored the 
truth, and the best speech of daily life was 
instinct with the Evangel. 

V. We are to speak the truth adapted to 
the age. That there is a proper adaptation 
of the Gospel finds ample warrant and il- 
lustration in the New Testament writings. 
It is probable that the different forms of the 
Gospel narrative came not only from the 
special nature and experience of the writer, 
but were governed also by the needs of the 
people for whom they were prepared. Both 
the doctrinal and the practical emphasis of 
the Epistles is brought out by the state of 
the people to whom they were written. And 
this principle of adaptation is a well-known 
fact in the development of doctrine. Here 
a latent truth has been brought to its full 
place, there an old form has been modified 
or carried to its logical conclusion or given 
a new application. 

The thought of the time in other realms, 
the new truths or errors of doctrine and life, 
have brought out one by one the develop- 
ment of Christian truth. 



The Preacher and His Age 215 

Absolutism in the Church led to the asser- 
tion of the freedom of the conscience and 
the doctrine of justification by faith alone. 
Absolutism in the state led to the new asser- 
tion of the sovereignty of God. Against 
a formal and lifeless orthodoxy and a practi- 
cal and hopeless paganism came the new 
emphasis on the grace of God, able to reach 
the downmost and farthest man. The hu- 
manity of Christ was urged in an age that 
had exalted him by theological speculation 
beyond the reach of life. And the fuller 
expression of the love of God came from an 
age that was marked by new humanity. In 
a day of growing social consciousness we are 
finding a larger meaning of duty in the mes- 
sage of Christ, the social implications of the 
great Christian truths, and in his life and 
sacrifice the dynamic for the larger ethical 
demands. 

We must speak truth to the need of the 
age. Our emphasis may well be frequently 
over against the special speculative or prac- 
tical difficulties and errors of our age. 

It is certain that our age is placing great 
stress upon secondary causes. Everything 
is traced to natural law, and a materialistic 
and fatalistic philosophy practically governs 
the thought and fives of many men. They 



216 Vital Elements of Preaching 

doubt the possibility of spiritual truth and 
the genuineness of religious experience. 

Should not the emphasis be placed in our 
preaching more on obey than believe? 
Should we not try to awaken the moral sense 
by demands upon it? Correct views of 
Christ and the doctrines of grace are not 
unimportant, but the primary matter to 
men of our time is ethical, — it is the attitude 
of the inner life to Christ's ideal of life. And 
the moral conditions of faith should be 
pressed with all the force and persuasion 
possible. 

Closely allied with this is the practical 
apologetic of religious and philanthropic 
movements. A wise teacher said to a young 
minister that if he were in the pulpit he would 
preach once a Sunday on some truth or duty 
of the Christian faith, and then the second 
time give some example of the practical 
application of the truth to life, the biography 
of some noble Christian leader, the study 
of some missionary or social or philanthropic 
effort. This meets the practical test which 
men are demanding of every sphere, and 
equally of religion. To show that Christian 
faith is an effective life, leading to the noblest 
character and to the welfare of men, is 
preaching to the need of the age. 



The Preacher and His Age 217 

And we must speak truth in the form that 
the age will understand and receive. Men 
are studying life and the relations of life, 
and there is faith in the common man. 
Biology, sociology, democracy, are forms of 
the age-truths. And these facts must color 
and shape the truth, if we really preach to 
the men of our time. 

Take the doctrine of sin. It is not enough 
to discuss it as our fathers did. That may 
not be enough to convince of sin and bring 
to the life of genuine faith men whose private 
lif e is irreproachable, but who are guilty of the 
gravest offences against the well-being of the 
many. "Sin and Society" shows how the 
sense of society must give a new and deeper 
sense of responsibility. 

Or take the doctrine of the Atonement. 
In an age that dwells upon faith and con- 
ceives every truth, not as a matter of plan 
and outer word, but of vital inner relation, 
it is not enough to speak of the death of 
Christ as a plan of salvation, and faith as a 
transaction. It must be presented as the 
law of life, as the personal relation of God to 
man, and illustration of the principle of all 
life, God and man under one divine law. 

That's the way you will find it again and 
again in the New Testament. That's the 



218 Vital Elements of Preaching 

special form that John gives to it, the deepest 
philosopher of faith. " Hereby perceive we 
love, because he laid down his life for us; 
and we ought to lay down our lives for the 
brethren." The Cross is the principle of the 
helpful life. 

Let us always follow the constructive 
method in presenting what may seem new 
views of truth. Truth is for life, and you 
are after lives. It is not the question of 
liberal and conservative so much as the spirit 
and method of the man. If the preacher has 
the patient, truth-loving qualities of the 
genuine scientific spirit, if he is humble and 
devoted, without pride of opinion and lust 
of power, intent solely on truth for the soul's 
sake, he can be trusted, he is under the spirit 
of God. "I would not disturb the most 
superstitious faith if I could not put a better 
in its place." (Maurice.) 

And let us try to turn the new knowledge 
and experience of the age to faith. To show 
the presence of God in the life of to-day, to 
help men to see that the plan of God is 
being unfolded in the work of scientist and 
philosopher, statesman and toiler, — that 
all life is in the plan of God and will in the 
end reveal Christ, — is true preaching to the 
age. 



The Preacher and His Age 219 

VI. We are to speak the truth that is ageless. 

The real problem is how to lift men above 
their times for spiritual use, to give men 
elevation and outlook. The true historic 
spirit will help to this. No age stands alone 
in its life and in its problems. It is only one 
phase of the continuous life of the race. We 
need to cultivate the historic sense of religion, 
to get rid of the feeling that we have dis- 
covered truth for the first time. The past is 
true and lives in all that we know and feel. 
Other men have laboured and we have entered 
into their labours. And the faithful ones of 
the past do not receive the full promise. 
There is a unity of faith that demands our 
contribution — "that without us they should 
not be made perfect." 

We need to feel the unity of life and the 
unity of faith. And through the ages the 
living Christ stands alone fitted to the power 
of an endless life ; he alone is found worthy 
to open the book of human destiny. Unbelief 
comes through the forces of life and can be 
met only by a truer, greater life. The person 
of Christ meets the need of every age. Here 
is the chance of growth, without the weakness 
of faith. In him is stability of truth with 
the progress of life. 

"If you are to be ministers to the sorrows 



220 Vital Elements of Preaching 

and teachers of the ignorance of men, you 
must grasp something which is sure and 
changeless. You must be ready to speak 
with modesty, but also with conviction and 
moral earnestness. We may not, we cannot, 
claim to satisfy all the doubts, and to solve 
all the problems, which beset the minds of 
men of our generation, but we may have, not- 
withstanding, a clear and assuring word for 
their hearts and consciences. For this we 
need to go back to the simple and spiritual 
attitude of the childlike in heart. Our 
glance must never be only around us. We 
need to look upward and inward if we are to 
bear any true message to those who are around 
us. Whatever confusion may fill our minds, 
in God who is the Father of all, in the Son in 
whom is redemption for all, in the Spirit by 
whom all may be sanctified, there is no change. 

" There are truths and spiritual principles 
which do not change. We must lay hold 
of these principles if our message is to be a real 
and assuring one to men who live in the midst 
of so much that is liable to change. " (Dr. 
Boyd-Carpenter.) 

Christ is the Eternal Contemporary and, 
when truly presented, he will not fail of 
meeting the deepest needs of men. 



LECTURE XI. SIMPLICITY OF 
SPEECH 

II Cor. 11:3. "I fear lest by any means your minds 
should be corrupted from the simplicity that is toward 
Christ." 

Matt. 5:37. "Let your speech be yea, yea; nay, 
nay." 



LECTURE XI 

Simplicity of Speech 

I have been speaking in these lectures of 
some vital elements of preaching; they are 
spiritual qualities, not external ; they belong 
essentially to a man's conviction and sympa- 
thies and conduct. It cannot be said often 
enough that the man makes the preacher. 
And I am not departing from this principle 
when I speak of the way the truth and life 
are spoken. Style is vital. The Frenchman 
long ago gave the truth its sententious form. 
Simplicity of speech is something vital. It 
has a living connection with the preacher 
and his work. 

What is simplicity of speech? It is the 
exact correspondence between the world 
within and the world without ; between the 
substance and the form of the message, be- 
tween the thought, feeling, and purpose, and 
the expression of them. One can go deeper 
than this and say that it is to hold truth 
and speech with clear-grained sincerity; to 
spare no pains to find the truth and to follow 
its leading, and to remove all obstruction 
223 



224 Vital Elements of Preaching 

from its clear shining. Simplicity is being 
true to one's self and the truth. It is doing 
everything for truth and nothing for show. 
It is to serve men and not to please self. 

It is something more than clearness, though 
it is not always easy to tell just what the 
something more is. It is clearness — there 
can be no simplicity without clearness — 
but clearness with an added grace. It is 
the added grace of humility that keeps self 
from holding or deflecting the pure rays of 
truth. It is the added grace of beauty that 
so presents truth that it shall win its way. 
I find a definition in a recent Outlook in an 
article on "Givers of Good Music." It says 
of Mr. Hugo Heerman, the concert master 
of the new Cincinnati orchestra, "Few 
violinists of the day equal Mr. Heerman in 
musicianship. As a soloist he makes no 
display. When he comes upon the stage, 
he appears like a quiet, studious German 
professor, and when he plays, he plays as if 
he were not thinking of himself or his tech- 
nique or even of his instrument, but only 
of the music ; and he plays so that the 
audience forgets everything but the music 
too." That is the simplicity of playing, 
and the simplicity of speaking is so that the 
audience will forget the speaker and even 



Simplicity of Speech 225 

the way he is doing it, and think only of the 
message. 

Three contemporaneous London preachers 
were thus described. The first made you 
feel what a wonderful man he was ; when the 
second spoke you were lost in admiration at 
the way truth was unfolded. You said 
" What a wonderful sermon ! " But when the 
third spoke you soon felt your own need and 
what a wonderful Saviour you had. Was not 
this the simplicity that was toward Christ ? 

Simplicity of speech must be a relative 
matter. It must have regard to the truth, 
the person, and the audience. The truths of 
the Gospel are not alike. Some make their 
appeal to the commonest thought and ex- 
perience, and others are reached through 
imagination or some height of spiritual 
attainment. To talk to some people of the 
fragmentariness of life and the unifying 
power of faith would signify little. They 
do not think in universals. Everything is 
personal and concrete. While others would 
find the very answer to life in such a message. 
And simplicity of style is not a fixed matter, 
to be reduced to definite laws of words and 
sentences. The great, rushing flood of 
Phillips Brooks is no more like the straight 
speech of Mr. Moody than the water-main 

Q 



226 Vital Elements of Preaching 

is like the river, with its thousand springs 
in the mountains. But both carry the simple 
water of life. 

Horace Bushnell suggests that words may 
not wholly reveal. The best speech is not 
a perfect instrument. There is always more 
in a man's heart than comes to his lips. 
And life is not as common and plain as the 
garden walk. Life sometimes shades into 
mystery as the landscape shades into the 
distant blue, and simplicity is not violated 
if it convey the infinite reach of truth and 
make the soul reverent before what it knows 
as reality but cannot see to the utmost verge. 

But — the ideal of all writing and speak- 
ing is simplicity. It might be called the 
truthfulness of nature. Mr. Charles Dudley 
Warner has said that it was the immortal 
element in literature. And we know that 
when men speak in this way, it has been 
gained at a great price. To think truly, to 
have genuine feeling concerning the truth, 
and to speak so that men may see and feel 
as we do — this is the highest art because 
it is coming back to nature, the childlike 
spirit of simplicity. 

All true education tries to do three things 
for us ; to help us see things as they are, to 
draw just conclusions from them, and to 



Simplicity of Speech 227 

express these truths accurately and con- 
vincingly. 

What are the reasons for simplicity of speech f 
The pulpit has special need of simplicity; 
simplicity of thought and simplicity of style. 
And unless the preacher realizes its impor- 
tance, and thinks about it and tries in 
every reasonable way to make himself fully 
understood by the people, he will fail in this 
primal and necessary virtue of the pulpit. 
And if he fails there, the failure is radical. 
No matter how much energy and earnest- 
ness he may put into single expressions and 
into his delivery, no matter how much beauty 
there may be in single parts, if the people 
do not fully get the message, the preacher is 
not in the best sense a teacher of truth. One 
of our weekly papers has recently published 
a striking article by an elder, setting forth 
a plea for "a chair of simplicity. " 

We ought to realize that what may be 
clear to us as trained men, acquainted with 
the thought and style of books, and familiar 
with the special discussions of theology, may 
fail to convey clear, distinct impression to 
some of our hearers. We shall have as well- 
trained men in our audiences as ourselves. 
And the plea for simplicity is no plea for 
weakness. It is the plea that we are speak- 



228 Vital Elements of Preaching 

ing to instruct and win men and not to please 
ourselves. And therefore our style is not 
to have the odour of the study, the exclusive 
tone of culture, but the qualities that shall 
win their way directly and easily into the 
thoughts and sensibilities of men. In the 
preface to the life of Dr. John Hall, his son, 
the biographer, says : 

"He gave his life for his generation. He 
sought no reputation as either a theologian 
or a man of letters. Indeed he deliberately 
turned away from work great gifts fitted him 
to do, for that which he deemed more im- 
portant ; the calling of men to life eternal in 
Christ Jesus our Lord. The purpose of these 
pages is to prolong a little the savour of his 
memory, to interpret, however weakly, the 
sincerity and singleness of aim that marked 
the man, to a generation that needs inspira- 
tion to simplicity." 

We need, then, to keep the people constantly 
in mind in our speech; the whole people, 
not a few favoured ones. We must reckon 
with a good deal of mental inertia on the part 
of an audience. What is not understood 
readily will not be understood at all. And 
where there is a failure to understand, the 
mind begins to wander, and so important 
truth and hard study are lost. 



Simplicity of Speech 229 

The very familiarity with the general 
features of the Gospel may be a hindrance, 
not a help to simplicity. Truth must be 
put in sharper, clearer, more distinctive forms 
of expression that there may be intelligent 
hearing, that the particular phase or relation 
of truth may not be confounded with some- 
thing else. Singleness of thought and single- 
ness of aim and the disciplined speech that 
shall make truth vocal give to simplicity 
its importance and force. 

How shall we gain simplicity of speech? 
I say gain, for, in the best sense, it is not 
a gift, but an attainment, a long, patient, 
laborious discipline of life and of speech. 
It is both an intellectual and moral and 
rhetorical product and comes from the union 
of all these elements. 

Simplicity of thought lies back of simplic- 
ity of speech. Not theological uncertainty, 
not conflicting views of truth, but that 
singleness of thought which is called by 
Paul the " simplicity toward Christ. " Clear 
thinking lies back of clear style. If a man's 
thoughts are hazy and obscure, lacking in 
sharp outline and well-defined relation, the 
expression must partake more or less of the 
same lack. 

Canon Liddon was a man of clear and 



230 Vital Elements of Preaching 

sharply defined thought and had little sym- 
pathy with a man half idealist and half 
mystic, with any conception, however great, 
if it were dim and vague. And he once said, 
when a dense fog had spread over London, 
that Bishop Westcott must have opened his 
windows at Westminster ! 

There can be no simplicity without a 
worthy amount of thought. There is such 
a thing as fatal fluency of speech, a love of 
speaking for speaking's sake. There is a 
fascination in standing before men, conscious 
of a certain power of mastery. There is 
a charm in the rhythmical flow of words, in 
the subtle modulation of voice that seems to 
bear no inseparable relation to the message. 
It was said that if George Whitefield only spoke 
the word " Mesopotamia," the audience would 
exclaim that an angel from heaven had 
spoken to them. And such a gift carries 
with it the subtle temptation to speak before 
God has spoken unto us. 

Who has not felt after listening to the abuse 
of the holy power of speech as if preaching 
were almost worthless ! It is Shakespeare's 
satire on " words, words, words I" 

" Why did you speak so loud this morning ? " 
said the young Henry Ward Beecher to his 
father. 



Simplicity of Speech 231 

"Oh, I always holler when I have little 
to say," was the witty and laconic reply. 

I believe that a serious danger to simplicity 
of speech lies in the common feeling that a 
minister must always have something to say, 
and that he must speak so long whether pre- 
pared with helpful thought or not. Every 
man has a mission in teaching the dignity 
and worth of speech, that words are to be 
symbols of realities, that a sermon is to be 
a message of God, — the words to be used 
solely to convey the truth and impressiveness 
of the message. 

Vagueness of thought is fatal to simplicity. 
If we are trying^to express what we but im- 
perfectly understand ourselves, trying to 
picture that which seems to loom large and 
uncertain through the fog of lazy, weak, and 
illogical thinking, the result must inevitably 
be a dim and imperfect style. A man should 
form the habit of close, consecutive thinking 
upon a subject without the use of the pen. 
It is a mistake to think that the mere use 
of the pen will shape obscure thought into 
simplicity. The lazy habit of beginning a 
sentence without knowing how it will end 
injures the singleness and simplicity of 
thought. 

Then there are men who affect profound 



232 Vital Elements of Preaching 

thought. They are never simple preachers. 
There are profound thinkers who have taken 
no pains to make their thought simple in 
expression and so intelligible to common 
minds. Bishop Butler is an example of this 
in his great " Analogy." Robert Browning, 
though the profoundest master of the human 
heart since Shakespeare, is almost a crypto- 
gram to many readers, and numerous are the 
witticisms at his expense. It is said that 
Jean Paul Richter was once asked the mean- 
ing of an obscure passage. He said, "once 
there were two who knew, God and Jean 
Paul ; but now God alone knows ! " 

There are men who speak only for the 
thoughtful world. To make philosophic and 
scientific truth popular by putting it in 
simple and intelligible form is called among 
the Germans "to vulgarize it," with some- 
thing of the accent of contempt. But our 
example of teaching is not to be taken from 
the world's greatest ones, but from him of 
whom it was said, "the common people heard 
him gladly." It is the glory of the Gospel 
that it is to be vulgarized, brought close to 
the thought and need of the people. And 
it should be the ambition of every pulpit 
to be heard just as the Master was. 

There are men called of God to minister 



Simplicity of Speech 233 

to certain types of mind, to certain tastes 
and conditions. Spurgeon and Liddon were 
both simple; each intent only on the truth 
for life, each having the spirit of moral great- 
ness, the loss of self in the message. Yet 
each was true to his nature and providential 
training. The one spoke from his homely 
wit, and sturdy common sense, and great 
heart, and touch with common life. The 
other made learning and culture, a long view 
of thought and life, give breadth and force 
to his message. The one ministered chiefly 
to humble folk ; the other spoke to all classes 
and conditions of men. And each had power 
by the genuineness of his word, and his rec- 
ognition of the essential man. Universal 
sympathy conditions this ministry of truth 
to the common heart. There can be no great 
art without it. An authority in musical 
criticism has said, "An exclusive, contempt- 
uous, undemocratic spirit is a sorry defect in 
any musician.' ' How much more of him 
who speaks, not chiefly of beauty, but of 
character and duty ! 

It must be confessed that there is at times 
an affectation of profoundness that is akin 
to obscurity. It is the weakness of some 
strong men. The use of philosophic and 
theological phrases, the terminology of the 



234 Vital Elements of Preaching 

schools, that is practically speaking in an 
unknown tongue ; or if the words themselves 
are familiar, they are a scripture mosaic 
that deals in general and abstract ideas. 
The language of religious sentiment that 
dwells in a mystical realm does not convey 
a personal and specific truth ; neither does 
the speaking of truth in sententious phrases 
that sound deep and strong, but if tested are 
found little more than sound. 

The Bible is a treasury of profound truth. 
It gives the literature of religion as well as 
its alphabet. It is philosophy and poetry as 
well as fact and duty. And it is our business 
to teach the profound principles of the Gospel 
as well as the easy lessons. And every 
simplest truth on its Godward side at last 
shades off into mystery where the eye of man 
can no longer follow. We can make the 
profoundest truth simple by clear style and 
familiar illustration. And it is our business 
to do so. 

We once had a course of lectures in this 
seminary by President Schurman of Cornell 
on Modern Philosophical Thinkers and their 
relation to Theology, — three Germans, Kant, 
Hegel, and Schleiermacher ; three English, 
Hume, Mill, and Spencer. More difficult 
subjects it would be hard to conceive, and 



Simplicity of Speech 235 

yet he made them so interesting and under- 
standable by personal incident and familiar 
illustration that the audiences grew until 
they were removed from the chapel to the 
audience room of the First Presbyterian 
Church, and the older pupils of the high 
school were constantly found among the 
listeners. 

It was the power of Abraham Lincoln that 
he put great principles in a way that appealed 
to the common intelligence and common 
sense of his audience. He had the pro- 
foundest respect for the average man, and he 
could not be satisfied until he so held his 
thought and so clothed it that it found the 
heart of the average man. 

Is it possible to make all truth simple? 
I answer — all truth as far as we know it. 
All truth that we ourselves see, and just as 
far as we see it, we can clothe in simple 
language if we give ourselves to it. But 
the language of the pulpit may convey and 
it ought to convey something of the mystery 
there is about our life and the far greater 
mystery of Godliness. 

The style of Horace Bushnell would not 
be fitted to the life of our age. We demand 
something more direct and concrete and vivid. 
We do not like to think quite so hard. We 



236 Vital Elements of Preaching 

wish to listen without conscious effort. The 
clouds and the storm sometimes gather about 
Bushnell's pathway, but there are always 
rifts into the infinite blue beyond. And it 
must have been a wonderful training in 
thought, in reverence and ideality, in the 
deeper elements of faith, to have heard his 
word. The language of the pulpit thus 
serves its high purpose if it helps to teach 
the lesson of reverence and humility. 

The moral qualities of simplicity are in 
personality. It may be enough to say that 
a sincere manhood, seeking the truth and 
nothing else, seeking the true life of men 
and nothing else, will surely lead to that 
singleness of thought and singleness of aim 
that are the moral source of simplicity of 
speech. An earnest man cannot play with 
words. He cannot create forms of speech 
for his own pleasure. He will break through 
the barriers of prejudice and indifference and 
find the quickest and surest way to the heart. 
And the childlike spirit of humility, free from 
vanity and self-seeking, caring nothing for 
the praise of men, will suffer nothing to 
obscure the truth. 

It is not necessary to dwell upon the rhetori- 
cal sources of simplicity of speech. They 
are familiar to all readers of good English. 



Simplicity of Speech 237 

I think the preacher should be careful to 
use natural illustrations, especially those 
that belong to daily experience and homely 
life, and such as rise from the subject as a 
very part of the thought. And he needs to 
make a study of words, the familiar word and 
the exact word. John Wesley's advice to 
his preachers was full of sound sense, quoting 
the words of Aristotle, " Though you think 
with the learned, you must speak with the 
common people.'' And there is truth in 
Vinet's saying, "For each idea there can be 
but one word." 

A recent writer compares Hawthorne with 
a well-known English theologian. "The latter 
is the awkward, lumbering gait of the village 
clown in contrast with the strength and grace 
of the Greek athlete. The English writer 
spatters his target all over with bullets, 
before he hits the bull's eye ; the great Ameri- 
can says precisely what he means to say, 
and says it in clear, bright sentences which 
leave on the mind an unforgetable impression. 
Who has not suffered under sermons which, 
because the preacher did not know words, 
jarred on all one's nerves with their crude 
colours and harsh discords ; or because he had 
never laboured to be concise, were full of 
sprawling, broken-backed sentences, which 



238 Vital Elements of Preaching 

came to an end, no man knew how; or, be- 
cause he had never learned to marshal his 
thoughts in due order, like Elisha's servant 
' went no whither ' ? " 

And then the preacher should eschew all 
exaggeration, the vice of the special pleader, 
"the vaulting ambition that o'erleaps itself 
and falls on the other.' ' It shows a very small 
faith in truth to try to make her walk on 
stilts. We should have Milton's confidence 
— "Though all the winds of controversy 
were let loose, who ever knew truth put to 
the worse in an open and free encounter ?" 

"The mental and physical restlessness 
which impress the observer of Sargent's 
portraits of the men and women of our time, 
the eager keenness, the total eclipse of con- 
templation is typical of our magazine prose. 
We force the note. 'If I don't exaggerate,' 
says a scientist whose laboratory is justly 
renowned, but whose popular magazine 
articles give alarm to his friends, 'if I don't 
exaggerate, the public will have none of me.' 
So say the child and the chorus-girl, and all 
lovers of the limelight and the megaphone." 

And what shall we say of the preaching 
that makes the end justify the means, that 
uses coarse and flaming speech and manner 
to tickle the ears of the groundlings, that has 



Simplicity of Speech 239 

the consuming egotism to think that the 
Gospel of the grace of God demands billings- 
gate and vaudeville to win men with immortal 
natures. It is a piece of impious impertinence 
in the presence of God, a pitiful confession 
of lack of faith in the power of truth and in 
the spiritual nature of man. 

The Gospel is never commended by care- 
less or irreverent speech. It demands the 
purest and best that we can give. No man 
has spoken straight to the heart of the com- 
mon man more than John Wesley did. He 
reached the brutal paganism of the English 
mines and towns. But England had no 
truer gentleman in his century. He never 
thought it needful to vulgarize his message 
before any audience or to make any con- 
cessions to coarseness. And, in our day, 
no missionary has reached all sorts of men 
more effectively than Henry Drummond. 
He could not be true to himself or his Gospel 
save by the purest speech. 

"What concord can the English Bible 
have with aught that is slipshod and mean ? 
When we remember what manner of book 
the Bible is, how its words "break into the 
dull round of common life like a shaft of sun- 
light on a cloudy day, or a strain of solemn 
music in a mean street, what can be more 



240 Vital Elements of Preaching 

unseemly than the vulgar speech and in- 
credible anecdote which have so often been 
its ignoble garniture ?" (Jackson.) 

"A man's gifts of exposition and exhorta- 
tion, his knowledge, force, indignation, humor, 
pathos, lose nothing of their power to move 
the most unlettered because they are linked 
with dignity and purity of speech." 

There is an undying charm in simplicity 
of speech. There is an unequalled power in 
letting truth make her own impression. 
It is making speech the perfect instrument of 
the Spirit of Truth. It is an ideal toward 
which we may well strive. The masters 
have been great because they have so largely 
learned it. 



LECTURE XII. THE COST OF 
PREACHING 

Ex. 27 : 20. "And thou shalt command the children 
of Israel, that they bring unto thee 'pure olive oil, 
beaten for the light, to cause a lamp to burn continually." 

Luke 8: 46. " Jesus said, Some one did touch me; 
for I perceived that power had gone forth from me." 



LECTURE XII 

The Cost of Preaching 

"The wrong notion about sermons has 
led to a great deal of the bad talk which is 
running about now among both laymen and 
clergymen about the excessive amount of 
preaching. 'How is it possible/ they say, 
'that any man should bring forth two strong, 
good sermons every week ? It is impossible. 
Let us have only one sermon every Sunday ; 
and if the people will insist on coming twice 
to the church, let us cheat them with a little 
poor music, and a few remarks and call it 
Vesper service, or let us tell a few stories to 
the Sunday School and call it Children's 
Church ; but let us not preach twice to men 
and women; it is impossible. ' It is impos- 
sible if by a sermon you intend a finished 
oration. It is as impossible to produce that 
twice as it is undesirable to produce it once 
a week. But that a man who lives with God, 
whose delight is to study God's words in the 
Bible, in the world, in history, in human 
nature, who is thinking about Christ and man 
and salvation every day, that he should not 

243 



244 Vital Elements of Preaching 

be able to talk about these things of his heart, 
seriously, lovingly, thoughtfully, simply, for 
two half hours every week, is inconceivable, 
and I do not believe it. Cast off the haunting 
incubus of the notion of great sermons. 
Care not for your sermon, but for your truth, 
and for your people ; and subjects will spring 
up on every side of you, and the chances to 
preach upon them will be all too few." 
(Phillips Brooks, "Yale Lectures," page 
152.) 

This may seem easy advice from a man with 
nature so gifted and training so large and 
rich, but it helps to put before us the cost 
of preaching. There are certain difficulties 
to preaching; they lie in the way of all 
success and must be overcome. The first is 
suggested by the quotation, viz. the false 
idea of the sermon. 

The sermon may partake of the elements 
of the highest literary art, but it is not to be 
regarded as a work of art. It is an instru- 
ment for service and not a work for intel- 
lectual and aesthetic delight. Mr. Aldrich, 
when editor of the Atlantic, returned the 
poem of a certain young contributor with the 
word, "If you had not written many others 
as good, I would accept this." It was a 
broad hint to write less and so better. We 



The Cost of Preaching 245 

must not compare the sermon with any form 
of literature, though we are to make the 
sermon as good as we can. 

The mental and physical indolence of many 
men stand in the way of success. One of our 
Indian ministers in his examination for licen- 
sure was asked " What is original sin ? " And 
he answered that he did not know what other 
people's was, but he knew that his own was 
laziness. Many a man has reached the dead 
line long before he was fifty. If a minister 
fails of the industry and persistence to grow, 
he has already begun to die. The only lazy 
line is the dead line. 

Dr. Tucker quotes the saying of a keen 
critic that the two besetting sins of the pul- 
pit are laziness and lying. By lying he means 
all unreality of life and speech ; and by lazi- 
ness "the disposition or the willingness to do 
the lesser in the place of the greater duty." 
Our profession is no exception to the law that 
success is only to be gained by the hardest 
kind of work. Mr. Gilder describes Mr. 
Cleveland as a fisherman. He was always at 
it ; he never gave up. And that is what the 
fisher of men must do. 

Men who do not lack energy and industry 
sometimes fail of the best work through un- 
disciplined powers. They have never been 



246 Vital Elements of Preaching 

trained to consecutive thought. They do 
not know how to concentrate the faculties 
upon their tasks. 

The long, quiet hours of the study are 
monotonous and tiresome. They want the 
stir and colour of life. They are like children 
who do not love their home, but are drawn by 
the lure of the street. They must touch arms 
and go dancing down the pavement. The 
long, patient thought to follow the writer 
through one of the New Testament letters ; 
the rebuilding step by step of the world in 
which a prophet lived and wrote, and so the 
understanding of his message ; the meditation 
upon the fact of Christ until he lives before 
the mind a visible glory, in all the splendid 
invitation and command of his ideal and 
redemptive life; the effort to master some 
prophetic mind who interprets God in modern 
life ; the labour that makes the truth grow into 
the living message, and expresses it so that it 
shall be real and living for other lives, — 
this is distasteful and impossible to an 
untrained man. It is not the question of the 
schools, but whether the preacher has a dis- 
ciplined life. It is the question whether the 
whole man, — body, intellect, and moral na- 
ture, the whole personality — can be com- 
manded and used by the purpose of ministry. 



The Cost of Preaching 247 

The disciplined armies have won the battles 
of the world. The trained preacher faces his 
task without dismay. It is an impossible 
task without God. But the servant knows 
what to do and how to do it. He says with 
George Meredith, 

"Life is but a little holding, 
Lent to do a mighty labour." 

The body is ready to add to the power of the 
spirit, the will bends to its work, the mind is 
alert to receive and give. 

There are dull men who are workers, who 
do the best with their powers, and receive 
the "well done" at last. God calls his ser- 
vants from every sphere, and through mani- 
fold experience, but every man thus honoured 
is greatly disciplined in his work. Charles 
H. Spurgeon took an old, historic pulpit at 
nineteen, in the heart of South London, but 
he suffered no man to despise his youth, and 
grew by the unfolding and devotion of every 
power he had. God helps those who help 
themselves is a spiritual law also. The 
Spirit is the friend of law ; his inspirations 
come to the men who are faithful. 

And the demand for disciplined and con- 
centrated energy is found in the multiplication 
of duties. The executive demands of the 



248 Vital Elements of Preaching 

modern church through its multiform agencies 
and activities, the social and civic calls upon 
the preacher who has the gifts and spirit of 
leadership, may leave little time and strength 
for the preparation of the message. A man 
needs the sense of proportion, putting the 
first things first, and then the disciplined 
strength to redeem the time, to make the 
best use of his powers for his great task. 
It is therefore well to think of the cost of 
preaching. 

All noble achievement seems to be so easy ; 
there is such a joy in it that we do not see 
the law of sacrifice that governs this too. 
We look at some great masterpiece and dis- 
miss the whole thought of the work with 
that easy word — genius. But was it not 
Leonardo da Vinci who offered the prayer 
as he worked, — "Thou, O Lord, sellest all 
good things at the price of labour!" And 
Longfellow sees the process when he says, 

"In the elder days of art, 
Builders wrought with greatest care 
Each minute and unseen part, 
For the gods see everywhere." 

("The Builders.") 

A modern preacher like Dr. George A. 
Gordon or Dr. Charles E. Jefferson has such 
insight into truth, such mastery of the in- 



The Cost of Preaching 249 

struments of expression, that we think it 
simply a gift. We do not think of the pain- 
ful, patient processes of attainment, the slow 
gains in many fields of thought, the increased 
self -direction for a worthy end; the depth 
of desire, the strivings of spirit, the devote- 
ment of life to the chosen calling. He who 
is not willing to pay the cost cannot have 
the power. 

"Oh, the painfulness of his preaching," 
says quaint Thomas Fuller of some noble 
preacher of his day. 

I. It costs to receive the word of God. It 
must be taken out of a dead parchment, from 
between the covers of a book, and be made 
into a living word. It must be read from 
the many books of human life, from the 
many coloured leaves of nature, and grow into 
a conviction, an imperative, a passion that 
shall carry the whole man under its sway. 
Such a word does not come easily. If it 
seems to be the inspiration of the moment, 
there are forty years behind it, to use the 
well-known saying of Henry Ward Beecher. 

It means the intellectual knowledge of the 
word, the study that shall be able to apprehend 
something of its true meaning. It means the 
light of other knowledge that shall authen- 
ticate and distinguish and vivify the word, 



250 Vital Elements of Preaching 

the holding of the Gospel truths as essential 
and rational concepts of the human mind. 

It means the meditation upon these truths 
of redemption; holding them fixedly before 
the mind, holding the life to them as divine 
standards, working them out in their relation 
and application to life, finding their meaning 
for oneself and for other men. Alexander 
Maclaren, when asked his method of sermon- 
preparation, humorously replied, — "it was 
sitting in his chair and looking at the backs 
of Meyer's commentaries. " All teachers of 
the race, from Moses and Isaiah and Socrates 
to the real prophets of our own day, have cul- 
tivated the power of withdrawing the mind 
from the strife of tongues and the confusion 
of moral things and dwelling upon the essen- 
tial and eternal truths of God and the soul, 
as though there were nothing else in the 
universe. 

We must be quiet if we hear those voices 
of God; not in the earthquake or the fire, 
but in the still voice that is like silence itself. 
We must be still if the eye of faith is to ob- 
serve truths so far-reaching in their results. 
We must rise above the din and confusion 
of the local and temporal, if we are to see 
truths for all men, and feed their hearts with 
the word that abideth forever. 



The Cost of Preaching 251 

The foundation on which the great tele- 
scope rests must be laid deep down on the 
rock-bed of the earth, that it may not be 
troubled by the life about it. The least 
vibration here may mean thousands of miles 
difference up yonder. 

It means prayer, the conscious and purpose- 
ful effort to realize the person and presence 
of God, the removal from life of whatever 
interferes with such fellowship, the consider- 
ing of truth and duty in that atmosphere 
free from earthly mists and distractions, the 
opening of the life to the Spirit to take the 
things of Christ and reveal him to us, to 
lead us into all truth, the seeking from God 
the answer to the deepest cravings of the 
heart. "To pray with the heart and the 
understanding, to believe that God hears 
prayer and yet verily doeth what pleases 
him, this surely," said Coleridge, "is the 
highest exercise of the faculties of the human 
spirit." 

And then to make all the truth our own 
by honest acceptance and loyal obedience, 
never suffering any truth to remain a the- 
ory, a speculative knowledge, but as in the 
prophet's vision " eating the roll" that it 
may become a part of life itself. 

"We have to remember that the Word of 



252 Vital Elements of Preaching 

God is not merely a collection of truths which 
can be written in a book and learned by rote. 
It is not merely a number of principles which 
require to be applied under new circumstances 
to different cases as they arise. But it is 
a vital energy passing from God to man at a 
given time and in a given place, which may 
be compared to a hammer that pounds the 
quartz rock, or a keen blade that severs the 
ligaments and nerves in the hands of a dis- 
sector. For the reception of this word the 
soul must, to use David Brainerd's expres- 
sion, be ' drawn out ' ; it must pass up to 
God like great feelers seeking nutriment; 
it must wrestle and strive in its narrow cham- 
ber until it is enlarged. If we are deter- 
mined, if we are persistent in prayer, if we 
can toil at books and men, always praying, 
never fainting; if we can tread the desert 
ways of meditation, always praying; if we 
can, in humble temerity and with resolution, 
made firm by weakness, grapple with God, 
spirit to spirit, knee to knee, hand to hand, 
— since he graciously permits it — we may 
hear the still, small voice ; we may find truth 
flowing towards us like the dayspring from 
the dewy eyelids of the morning, or like the 
waters which issue from the cool, clear foun- 
tains of the untainted rocks ; we may speak 



The Cost of Preaching 253 

to men, not in the faltering accents of sur- 
mise, but in the sharp-cut and convincing 
speech of thus saith the Lord." (R. F. 
Horton. " Verbum Dei," page 202.) 

We are to buy the truth and sell it not. 
It costs to possess any truth, to make it 
really our own, so that when we speak the 
truth it is the issue of life. Bishop Greer 
speaks of a plagiarism of doctrine quite as 
evil as the plagiarism of words. "The 
preacher who goes week after week to some 
venerable storehouse of doctrine and opens 
the door and takes some venerable doctrine 
out, and gives it forth to his people simply 
because it is taught by his church, without 
having first, in some sense real and true, made 
that doctrine his own, is a plagiaristic preacher, 
and such a preacher is not an effective 
preacher." ("The Preacher and his Place/ ' 
page 76.) 

And then further on in the same lecture 
he speaks of a woman whose speaking moves 
him as few preachers ever do. He does not 
agree with some of her truths. "But she 
believes them and her whole personality 
seems to be saturated with them; and the 
earnestness with which she speaks is not 
simulated and feigned, but most intensely 
real. And it is that real, unfeigned, and deep 



254 Vital Elements of Preaching 

personal earnestness which touches me as 
well as others and makes me more alive" 
(page 94). 

II. It costs to interpret the lives of others. 
There are men of special emotional and 
imaginative endowment who are able to 
interpret life broadly and truly from their 
own natures. And others from a world 
literature understand the forces of humanity. 
But no man ever preached well who did not 
know life well, and this knowledge of life 
comes from that identification with the 
nature and needs of men which means the 
life of self-sacrifice. It may be easy to know 
our friends; it will not be a hardship to 
sympathize with those of kindred nature 
and tastes. But to try to know and win 
those who care nothing about us, to enter 
into the life of those of different nature and 
training and social conditions, — this takes 
the purpose and persistent devotion that is 
never without sorrow and pain. To be a 
man of humanity and not a man of a single 
intellectual and social class means the sharing 
of the burdens and sins and sorrows of others. 
There is no other way to understand. 

There are some men who do not know what 
the other man thinks. There are leaders 
of thought and service who are fearfully 



The Cost of Preaching 255 

provincial, who only speak to their class. 
Powerful conservative interests may check 
constructive ideas and retard the spiritual 
good of the people. 

" Unconsciously the chair, the pulpit, the 
rostrum, the sanctum, and the salon are 
tinctured by the political creed of their 
element, which is close-knit, positive, and 
influential." (Ross, " Changing America.") 

This striking illustration in political 
thought of the principle that the eye deter- 
mines the vision and that the eye is affected 
by the life of the person, is just as true in 
religious life. It is often a mark of self- 
denial to break the bonds of circumstance 
and feel with "men, my brothers." It is 
the condition of spiritual leadership thus to 
identify one's life with the larger world and 
try to interpret the spiritual meaning of it. 
It is not a pleasant thing to come into daily 
contact with coarse and vulgar and selfish 
men and women ; try to find the germs of 
good in them and help it to grow. 

Who that has heard Mr. Frank Higgins, 
the sky pilot of the loggers, can forget his 
story of the old man and his dog, that one 
chord into a closed heart found and made to 
carry the message of a new life ? 

Really to know men in their sorrows and 



256 Vital Elements of Preaching 

struggles, their hopes and fears, means the 
ceaseless outgoing of sympathy, which is 
the most exhausting experience of life. The 
late Dr. Anson J. Upson, who was one of the 
most successful and distinguished teachers 
of his day, gave as his chief reason for leaving 
the pastorate for the professor's chair, the 
ceaseless drain of ministering to the afflicted. 
We cannot stand of! and bear the burdens 
of men at arm's length, or hire some one else 
to take all the pressure of it. We cannot get 
used to the sins and sorrows of men. We 
can never, like the surgeon, make our min- 
istry depend upon the mechanical certainty 
of our stroke. We must constantly renew 
the horror of sin. We must feel the defeats 
and pains of men as our own hurt. " Ac- 
quainted with grief" is the striking picture 
of the burden-bearer. Grief ! so various and 
so intricate ! Acquainted ! Only by effort, 
by long and hard process, does one really 
know. We must get under the load our- 
selves. Whatever cripples, hinders, bur- 
dens, pains my brother man, I must feel, if 
I help him to endure or remove. 

We can understand something of Paul's 
meaning when he wrote to the Thessalonians, 
"We were well pleased to impart unto you, 
not the gospel of God only, but also our own 



The Cost of Preaching 257 

souls, because ye were become very dear 
unto us." What a glimpse we get of the 
ministry of the true pastor in the holiday 
verse of the late John W. Chadwick, when for 
a moment he cast off burdens and became a 
care-free boy again ! 

"And oh, the gleam of the birches' stems, 
And the new green of the pines, 
And the hemlock-fingers sweeping low, 
Till they touched the creeping vines ! 

" And every bank was studded thick 
With wild flowers sweet and rare ; 
While the ferns seemed made of spirit-stuff, 
They were so slight and fair. 

" Could it be, I thought, in the world with this 
There was dust and heat and glare ? 
Could it be there was sorrow and hate and sin, 
And terror and wild despair ? 

" Alas ! it could ; but for this one day 
I would live as if it could not ; 
I would dream that the world from end to end 
Was only this one dear spot." 

This is how Dr. John Watson speaks of 
the pastoral work of the true preacher: 

"With the true pastor, visitation is a 
spiritual labour, intense and arduous, beside 
which reading and study are light and easy. 
When he has been with ten families and done 
his best by each, he comes home trembling 



258 Vital Elements of Preaching 

in his very limbs and worn out in soul. 
Consider what he has come through, what he 
has attempted, what, so far as it can be said 
of a frail human creature, this man has done. 
He has tasted joy in one home, where the 
husband has been restored to the wife from 
the dust of death ; he has shared sorrow with 
another family, where pet Marjorie has died ; 
he has consulted with a mother about a son 
in a far country, whose letters fill the anxious 
heart with dread; he has carried God's 
comfort to Darby and Joan, reduced suddenly 
to poverty, and God's invitation to two young 
people, beginning life together in great pros- 
perity. 

"It is exhausting to rejoice or to sorrow, 
but to taste both sensations in succession is 
disabling ; yet this man has passed through 
ten moods since midday, and each with all 
his strength. His experiences have not all 
been wiped out, as a child's exercises from his 
slate ; they have become strata in his soul.'* 
("The Cure of Souls," page 113.) 
And Robertson Nichol says of him : 
"The characters, the dangers, and the 
sorrows of his people were ever in his mind. 
More than once after his death he was called 
an interpreter. He knew men so well that 
he spoke home to them. He knew life so 



The Cost of Preaching 259 

well that he understood the Bible and could 
make it a living book. His familiarity with 
life's tragedy and comedy saved him from 
cynicism and caricature, and kept him sound 
and sweet at heart. He exercised a priest- 
hood of love as well as a priesthood of truth. 
That priesthood of love was fulfilled with 
constant vigilance, with unsparing labour, 
and with such a severe self-denial as gave 
dignity to his whole character.' ' 

III. It costs to gain the power of true ex- 
pression for the Message. Many of us know 
the difficulty of self-expression. We know 
how feeble our words are to express what is 
in our hearts. To train speech so that it 
will shadow forth our thought, so that it will 
pulse with the feeling of our heart, this is the 
longest and hardest art. 

Robert Louis Stevenson had the supreme 
gift of taking pains. "I imagine nobody 
had ever such pains to learn a trade as I 
had ; but I slogged at it day in and day out ; 
and I frankly believe (thanks to my dire 
industry) I have done more with smaller 
gifts than almost any man of letters in the 
world." (Balfour's " Lif e of Stevenson," 2: 
169.) 

Mr. Joseph Chamberlain gained his leader- 
ship in the Commons by the rapier-like thrust 



260 Vital Elements of Preaching 

of his speech, by his sentences that went to 
their mark like rifle-balls. And he said to a 
group of younger speakers, "The trouble 
with you young fellows is that you don't 
take enough pains with your speeches." 

Every one knows the clearness of Mr. Hux- 
ley's essays. Language never expressed 
thought more unmistakably. And they were 
written over and over until criticism had done 
its utmost. And that's the way Newman 
gained his style that has the revealing quality 
of the light. "I have been obliged to take 
great pains with everything I have written." 

And when our words try to express God's 
thought, to interpret the person and purpose 
and love of the Divine Father, we may well 
exclaim with the prophet, "I cannot speak; 
I am a little child" ; or with another, "I am 
a man of unclean lips." 

We ought to feel that nothing is good 
enough for the Gospel. The message is the 
great thing, but surely the garment should 
not be unworthy of it. It is a monstrous bit 
of irreverence to deal carelessly with the word, 
in any way to fail to commend the Gospel 
by our speech and manner. 

Colonel Verbeck of Manlius in an address 
in this city told of the cost of a Japanese 
sword. He described minutely the making 



The Cost of Preaching 261 

of the sword of the old Samurai class. In- 
finite pains were taken with it ; a man's 
whole life often went to the making of a 
knight's sword. And we dare not be care- 
less with the forming of the word, the sword 
of the Spirit. 

Dr. John Watson believed that what could 
be done to make style and manner winsome 
ought to be done. We know what distinc- 
tion he gave to his truth, how he laboured to 
make his message simple and persuasive. Yet 
he confessed to a lack. "He came to think 
that he had spent too little time on the form 
of his sermons. The want of distinction in 
the case of a speaker dealing with the most 
majestic ideas he thought a crime. ' It is a 
species of profanity. It is an act of intellec- 
tual indecency.' He said that if he went 
back he would seek more earnestly a becoming 
dress for the message of God." 

I have spoken of the cost of true preaching 
not to make it seem so difficult that men will 
shrink from the task, but to make it seem so 
great that men will seek divine help and the 
discipline of life for it. No man is worth 
much in the Kingdom of God who is not 
beaten out of all self-conceit, and made to 
see that in preaching also the way of the 
cross is the way of growth and of power. 



262 Vital Elements of Preaching 

But the man who stands as the true inter- 
preter of the word and the lives of men and 
comes to this at whatever cost has a sense 
of privilege in his hardest work, and an as- 
surance of ministering to the highest wants of 
human life that nothing else can give. The 
pain of discipline is nothing to the joy of 
service. 

Henry Drummond said that he had had 
some of the finest joys of earth, — the joys of 
books and of art, of nature and of travel 
and sport, of friends and honour ; but there 
was no joy like the assurance that your word 
had brought the life of faith to men. 



LECTURE XIII. THE SENSE OF 
MESSAGE 

I Cor. 9: 16. "For if I preach the Gospel, I have 
nothing to glory of; for necessity is laid upon me; 
for woe is unto me, if I preach not the Gospel." 



LECTURE XIII 

The Sense of Message 

The sense of message is the prophetic 
element in preaching. It is the mark of the 
preacher, — the inner witness of his call, 
the imperative reason for his vocation. 
Amid the various voices of the world stands 
the man who claims to speak for God. It 
is not the question whether the pulpit has 
declined or not, whether other work has at- 
tracted the most gifted sons of the Church, 
whether other means of teaching are multi- 
plying the work formerly done by the pulpit 
alone ; it is the question of its distinctive 
claim and authority and influence. The 
preacher is the man with a message. He 
believes that he has a word of God, the mes- 
sage of God's presence and working in human 
life. It is a truth that has found him and 
masters him ; he feels it to be God's truth 
to his own life, and so he must speak it to 
other lives. It is an absorbing, possessing, 
impelling word; it is a "fire in the bones," 
a "woe is me" in the heart, a "love con- 
straining" on the lips. 
265 



266 Vital Elements of Preaching 

All great preachers have had the sense of 
message, their very greatness, their impress 
upon the age due to the positiveness and 
dominance of the message. When Peter 
and John were threatened by the rulers of 
the Jewish church and forbidden to speak in 
the name of Jesus, you remember their 
answer, — 

" Whether it be right in the sight of God 
to hearken unto you rather than unto God, 
judge ye ; for we cannot but speak the things 
which we saw and heard " (Acts 4: 19). 

And this has been the mark of the pro- 
phetic spirits through the ages, the master- 
ing, compelling sense of God's word, — Chrys- 
ostom in the corrupt court of Constantine, 
Augustine amid the conflicting philosophies 
and race-conflicts of the Eastern Church, 
Ambrose in the growing splendour and power 
of the Western Church, Savonarola speaking 
to the heartless, cynical luxury and culture 
of Florence, — Hus, Wyclif, Luther, Calvin, 
Knox, voicing the protest of the awakened 
conscience against a worldly hierarchy, and 
giving God's message once more to the in- 
dividual soul. What a line of beacon lights, 
of men with the profound sense of the pres- 
ence and will of God ! And the moderns 
who have kept the truth alive, who have 



The Sense of Message 267 

helped to its larger incarnation in our age, 
have been just as manifestly under the il- 
lumination and guidance of the divine word. 

"I don't care," said Robertson to a cap- 
tious critic of his preaching. 

"Do you know what 'I don't care' came 
to?" asked his critic with sanctimonious 
seriousness. 

" Yes," was the prompt reply of the fearless 
preacher. "He was crucified on Calvary." 

When Robert W. Dale grew into the con- 
ception of the living Christ, the vision dom- 
inated his preaching ever afterwards, as the 
sun drives away the mists and shadows and 
floods the landscape. For months he could 
think of nothing else and speak of nothing 
else. Hugh Price Hughes, the leader of the 
Wesley an Inner Mission, and Bishop West- 
cott, of the Established Church, so under- 
stood how the other half lives, and so felt 
the burden of poverty and so understood the 
relation between extreme want and godless- 
ness and misery, injustice and wretchedness, 
that they read a larger message in the Gospel 
and taught the social implications of the 
Cross. And from such men the pulpit has 
gained the true accent for a social and indus- 
trial age. 

Mr. Moody was possessed by the thought 



268 Vital Elements of Preaching 

that the redemptive power of Christianity 
was in the love of God. He was so full of 
the thought that he even stopped a stranger 
on the street with the striking word, "The 
grace of God has appeared unto all men, 
bringing salvation. " "Men know that they 
are sinners," he would say, "They do not 
believe that God loves them. Only convince 
men of this love and they will be saved." 
And the love of God gave light and warmth 
and power to his speech. It is borne in upon 
Dr. Jefferson that the Church is too much 
ignored in the religious life of to-day. Spir- 
itual and religious movements are far wider 
than the Church and their leaders often fail 
to connect them with the motive and train- 
ing that the Church gives. And so he 
holds up the divineness of the Church and 
calls men to a new loyalty to the body of 
Christ. 

These are striking examples of the sense of 
message. And you notice the special em- 
phasis in this sense of message. It is some 
special phase of the Gospel, before neglected 
or partially stated, that has become a reve- 
lation to the soul and makes the prophetic 
element and power of the message. Not 
that the preacher sees only one phase of the 
truth and so gives an eccentric Gospel. He 






The Sense of Message 269 

sees all truth from one standpoint and so 
corrects and enlarges the view of truth, and 
gives the message its convincing timeliness. 
And so, through the generations, the ever 
new, ever old Gospel, is unfolding its fulness 
and divineness. 

This truth is the more evident in excep- 
tional natures. Men have the sense of mes- 
sage in proportion to the fulness and vitality 
of their natures. But every preacher may 
have the mark of the prophet in some degree. 
All will hold the essential truth of the Gospel 
as necessary for their own life and so for all 
men, and then each man will hold and express 
the essential truth with the special light or 
emphasis that comes from his experience 
and that will fit him the best to serve the 
religious life of his age. 

The sense of message is not only the mark 
of the preacher. It is also the justification 
of the preacher. There is a professional 
spirit that is always preaching, always in- 
structing men in their duty, that points a 
moral from every event of life. Such men 
always wear the clerical garments. They 
are fearful lest the world forget they are 
preachers, and turn every song into a sermon. 
For such professionals Mr. John Burroughs 
must have written his suggestive essay, 



270 Vital Elements of Preaching 

"Thou shalt not preach.' ' Some things will 
come without our striving; Nature herself 
is no mean preacher. 

" Nor less I deem that there are powers 
Which of themselves our minds impress ; 
That we can feed this mind of ours 
In a wise passiveness. 

" Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum 

Of things forever speaking, 

That nothing of itself will come, 

But we must still be seeking?" 
(Wordsworth, " Expostulation and Reply.") 

There are some experiences of life before 
which silence is the divinest wisdom. The 
more we speak, the more we darken counsel 
without wisdom. The more we try to pene- 
trate with our unaided reason, the more im- 
penetrable the mystery grows. The preacher 
may be as foolish as Job's friends. All we 
can do and the best we can do is to be dumb 
before the Lord. Life itself is moral and 
spiritual, and we may trust men to read what 
is written there. There are other ministries 
of God beside the sermon. And it is well 
that the preacher should let other voices 
speak, that he should listen before he at- 
tempts to preach. 

But men will listen and not grow weary 
to a man who has a real sense of message. 



The Sense of Message 271 

Who ever tires of Thackeray's sermons 
against the shams and foibles and snobbery 
of the world ! We admit all that the critics 
may say against the lessening of his art by 
his weakness forever to moralize, — but we 
never skip his sermons in the interest of art, 
but read all the outpourings of this big heart 
because it breathes the scorn of the base and 
the love of the good. 

There never was so much preaching as now, 
and people never listened more intently for 
the true and brave word. Only preaching, 
as in every age of awakened moral life, is 
often outside the churches. The preacher 
may not stand with the sanctions of the 
Church or use the familiar method of the 
pulpit. He may be a President lifting up 
the primary principles of public morality, 
a Secretary of State, trying to interpret di- 
plomacy in the light of Christian brotherhood, 
a Governor calling the citizenship of a state 
to a finer responsibility, an editor or a novel- 
ist, voicing the dim and confused strivings 
of an age, and calling for deeper reality in 
religion. The preacher is the man of the 
hour. 

"But this modern preaching has shaken off 
the shackles of the homiletic firstly and 
secondly, it has escaped from surplice and 



272 Vital Elements of Preaching 

pulpit and dim religious light ; it has ceased 
to care for metaphysical formula, and girding 
itself with the weapons of the time, it sallies 
forth in broad daylight into market-place 
and mill and legislature and court, to do 
battle for the moral ideals of the race. And 
the multitude throng and crowd to hear it. 
Preaching out of date ? There is more eager- 
ness to hear a worthy appeal to the sense of 
duty to-day than ever before since Miles 
Standish stepped on Plymouth Rock." 
(Faunce, " Educational Ideals of the Min- 
istry.") 

Men will listen to the preacher with the 
sense of message. They are always looking 
for such men. The world cannot live with- 
out his word. All the higher interests of life 
depend upon this message from above. The 
intellectual life of the world depends upon a 
vital pulpit in ways it is not always willing 
to acknowledge. The worth of man as a child 
of God, the use of his powers in harmony with 
the highest law, the aim of all achievements, 
the welfare of man, — has its clearest teaching 
and strongest support from the Christian 
pulpit. And the social movement, to give 
justice and humanity to all the relations of 
society, where will it find the sufficient motive 
and bond save in the message of the Gospel ? 



The Sense of Message 273 

And the training of the individual life, 
the gift of hope to the broken-hearted, sup- 
port to them that are weary, the light of a 
higher world upon the common things of life, 
the certainty of the moral meaning of life 
and the triumph of moral forces, — how can 
the world live without the prophet's word ? 
It would lapse into barbarism without the 
open vision. 

Ezekiel's vision may be honestly applied 
to-day. A renewed temple signified a re- 
newed Judaism. The waters that healed all 
they touched, that made a garden of the 
desert, that turned the dead sea into teeming 
life so that the fishermen plied their trade 
there, flowed from the altar of the sanctuary. 
And the Christian pulpit is a source of cleans- 
ing and quickening influences for the higher 
life of the race. Religion depends upon its 
teachings. We cannot magnify its office 
enough. We cannot do enough to give it 
honour and power. 

Only, let us not measure the preacher by 
the numbers that listen to him and the popu- 
lar name he may win, but by the divineness 
of his truth and the spiritual impulses and 
the moral changes that can be traced to his 
word. For this is the authority to which men 
will bow, — not the authority of a church or 



274 Vital Elements of Preaching 

a creed, but the authority of a life convinced, 
directed, inspired by a message whose ut- 
terance is as convincing as the light, that 
awakens the sense of God and the need of 
God, and leads to a life that bears in itself 
the sanctions of its truth. "Upon this rock 
I will build my Church," said Jesus of the 
man who made the first great confession, 
"And the gates of Hell shall not prevail 
against it." I say again the sense of mes- 
sage is the prophetic element in preaching. 
How can one preach unless he be sent ! How 
can one preach unless he have a message of 
God to give ! 

So, of all the questions about preaching, 
nothing is more important than this, — How 
shall the preacher have the sense of message? 

The preacher must speak so much, he gains 
such facility by his much speaking, that he 
of all men is most in danger of idle words. 
Tennyson waited twelve years for a home of 
his own that he might be true to his calling, 
find his own message, and give it a worthy 
form. That is a keen criticism by George 
Eliot of a well-known preacher of her day 
that "he had the misfortune of speaking too 
early and too easily upon the greatest 
themes." 

The sense of message is no natural endow- 



The Sense of Message 275 

ment of a sensitive and magnetic personality. 
All gifts can be used in its service, and the 
highest gifts are not too much for its best 
expression. But it is no gift of fluent speech. 
It is deeper and harder than this. In fact, 
natural eloquence may be its greatest hin- 
drance. " Eloquence," says Dr. Horton, "is 
a prancing palfrey that the Son of Man rarely 
rides. " Many a false prophet has been 
eloquent, and many a word of God has come 
through stammering lips. 

It is always to be kept in mind that a man's 
message comes in some way from his life, if 
it is a vital message. It is infinitely larger 
than his life, an ideal ever before him, a 
banner leading him on, but something that 
he has found precious and that he is ever 
trying to attain. And this gives to life its 
criticalness and to all our experiences their 
significance. A man is trained in his work. 
It is the law of the spiritual life that we 
learn by doing. The clearness and fulness 
of a man's message comes by living. We 
are in a world of beautiful and beneficent 
order. Nothing comes amiss in God's world. 
Nothing can be ignored, nothing can be ex- 
cepted. ' ' The past meets us in every turning 
point of the way." A life of singleness, his 
"meat to do the Father's will," gave to Jesus 



276 Vital Elements of Preaching 

the sense of certainty, and to his word its 
divineness. 

There are some strange and exceptional 
ways of God's training. How vivid the 
relation between experience and message in 
the prophets of the Old Testament. Each 
man stands out for the individuality of his 
training and so for the individuality of his 
word. The knowledge of his people and of 
Egyptian life, the silence of the desert, and 
the majesty of the mountains are read in 
the law of Moses. The tumultuous passions 
and dramatic experiences of David gave his 
songs their universal message. The lessons 
of hard and dangerous toil, the truth under 
the stars and in the open fields, the contact 
with life beyond the narrow limits of his own 
people, are all in the ethical and social mes- 
sage of Amos with something of the inevi- 
tableness and universality of the will of God. 
And Hosea could never have taught the long- 
suffering and forgiving love of God and made 
it the appeal of a purer life and loyalty with- 
out the heart-breaking experience of his own 
home. 

"Do I find love so full in my nature, God's ultimate gift, 
And doubt his own love can compete with it?" — 

The tenderness and faithfulness of God are 
read in the life and message of every true 



The Sense of Message 277 

prophet. Without the obscure, shut-in years 
in the little parish of Logiealmond, John 
Watson might never have trained that power 
to understand and interpret common life. 
The song that voiced the deepest experience 
of the human heart and the deepest lesson 
of the Cross came from the sightless eyes of 
young George Matheson. "I have learned 
more of God since my little boy died than 
from all the books I have read/' was pressed 
from the suffering, but submissive, heart of 
Horace Bushnell. The blackness of a father- 
less world, the patient loyalty to the most 
simple and primary fact of duty was in the 
message of Fred. W. Robertson and gave it 
a power over minds unsatisfied by the tra- 
ditional teachings of the day. We do not 
know what God has in store for us, but we 
are sure that he has nothing but good. 
And if he calls us through trying experiences, 
we will not think of ourselves as the afflicted 
ones, but get from it the truth of a nobler 
faith. 

The special influence of the times may help 
to give the sense of message and shape its 
form. Out of the movements of thought and 
life, new light may be thrown upon the truth, 
a new sense of need be felt and a new adap- 
tation of truth be reached. We live in a 



278 Vital Elements of Preaching 

larger world than our fathers. The limits of 
knowledge that have been pushed back by 
science reveal a more wonderful universe. 
The thought of man that has grown by study 
of all the past and by relation to the larger 
life of the race speaks of a more wonderful 
being. In the larger thought of nature and 
of man we interpret anew the mind and will 
of God. Christ as the most perfect mani- 
festation of God is the interpreter and ruler 
of all nature, and the law of life for all men. 
Out of a mechanical world of the past, we 
are privileged to enter a world of life. What 
is our larger conception of God? What is r 
our more vital conception of Christ? Is it 
larger only because more diffused and vague ? 
Is it vital only in the sense that it has the 
mystery of life? Surely the spirit of God 
in the study and work and expansion of the 
world has a fuller truth for us, a new glory 
for Christ. Shall the spiritual interpreta- 
tion of our age give the preacher a deeper 
sense of message and to his voice a clearer 
and diviner word ? Every man whose nature 
is open and sensitive enough to be impressed, 
must record that impression in his own ex- 
perience and so in his own sense of values. 
And it should be said that men will find 
a true sense of message, who have passed 



The Sense of Message 279 

through no trying and peculiar experience, 
who do not stand where they are forced to 
feel the drift or sweep of the age-thought. 
It may be the light upon the common ways 
of life. To stand in one's place, to meet the 
daily duties of our calling with cheerfulness 
and enthusiasm, is the assurance of a growing 
conviction of the worth of our calling and 
the increased clearness of its message. The 
path of duty lies mostly along the valleys, 
but it will climb now and then the hill-tops 
where the wider vision is had, where the past 
is understood and the future unrolled before 
the eyes. And he is surest of these moments 
of revelation, of the sense of message, who is 
most consistently given to the tasks of the 
daily journey. 

How shall the preacher have the sense of 
message? That involves processes, habits, 
that are common to all men. The sense of 
message is intellectual and moral in its source. 

What has the sense of message to do with 
the intellectual life? It comes from such a 
study of the Bible and the questions of re- 
ligion that the great message of Christianity 
shall be simple and clear. Dawdling over 
papers and current literature will never give 
it. Strength consumed in parish machinery 
will never give it. The Church needs more 



280 Vital Elements of Preaching 

prophets and not more priests. Only the 
steady effort to master the great books of 
religious experience will help a man to see 
truth clear and see truth whole. A preacher's 
library is the index of his attitude towards 
the message; his intellectual methods the 
revelation of his shallowness or the depths 
of his spiritual life. Many things may be 
unknown. His foible will not be an easy 
omniscience. His strength will be the ex- 
pert knowledge of the supreme question 
of life. Nothing but honest, hard, self- 
denying study can give a man the grasp of 
the central, essential truths of the Gospel. 
We should have more prophets in the pul- 
pit, if men took more time to find the word 
of God. 

The sense of message comes from a knowl- 
edge of life, from what men are thinking 
and doing to-day. It will be a present mes- 
sage and not the faint echo of other voices. 
There can be little isolation to-day. So the 
preacher fails of the nobility of his work who 
speaks to a fragment of man, or to a narrow 
group of natures and conditions. The pul- 
pit sometimes fails to know the real diffi- 
culties of life, the many obstacles and ways 
of faith, the real processes of the human soul. 

The preacher may not go beneath for- 



The Sense of Message 281 

mularies and creeds to what is actually taking 
place in the soul. He may not have a mes- 
sage to life. To have this touch with life, 
this sense of message to the men of his own 
age, he must be alive to the thoughts and 
interests of men. Whatever will interpret 
the age, the air that all men breathe, and in 
which they see and act, whatever will unlock 
the secret of any heart, — that he will strive 
to know, — philosophies, sciences, poems, 
the day's work, — these may be vital to his 
message as well as his Bible and theology. 
The one will help the other. On his voyage 
to Australia for his college evangelism, 
Henry Drummond took a complete set of 
Browning. And he wrote to a friend, 
"None can approach Browning for insight 
into life, or even into Christianity.' ' A 
young country pastor, who was getting a 
strong grip upon men, recently said, "I am 
studying agriculture just now as much as 
theology." The prophets of all ages have 
had this spirit. The Bible is the book of life, 
and its interpreters must know life. 

Not until the knowledge of truth and life 
becomes the personal possession does it have 
the moral quality of message. The preacher 
must be a witness before he can be a mes- 
senger. The most effective message may be 



282 Vital Elements of Preaching 

the testimony of life and speech. Not until 
he finds the truth precious, can it be a word 
of life to other men. Study gives it form. 
Experience, call it prayer, meditation, the 
resolve and effort to be doers of the word, 
fills it with life. Experience is the element 
that makes truth transforming, that gives 
it the accent of certainty, the spell of au- 
thority. Such a man will have something 
to say. He speaks out of his own life the 
message he has received, with the profound 
sense that what he has to speak men need to 
hear. The great message will be known and 
felt and applied every time he speaks to the 
actual life of men. 

What will this sense of message do for the 
preacher f 

(a) It will be the teacher of effective speech. 
There is nothing like the sense of message 
to give definiteness and purpose to the work 
of the pulpit. And purpose is the fashioner 
of style, clear, vivid, personal, practical. If 
a man has something to say, that he must 
speak, that he is profoundly convinced men 
need for their life, if he has something defi- 
nite to gain by his speech, then he will find 
a way to say it, the message will compel 
training and command the obedience of 
language and person. Nothing is suffered 



The Sense of Message 283 

to interfere with the purpose. Nothing is 
of use that does not convey the message. 
Nothing shall be unused that may express 
the message. There can be nothing vague 
and diffused like the electricity of the at- 
mosphere; truth must be brought to the 
point of light and power. 

When Dr. Robert W. Dale was giving his 
lectures on preaching at Yale, he was asked 
by the faculty and corporation of the uni- 
versity to speak upon English politics. He 
was a great citizen as well as preacher, and 
had stood upon many a platform by the side 
of Bright or Gladstone, and driven his own 
conviction into the conscience of English- 
men. But the presence of strangers, the 
critical atmosphere of a university, the un- 
certainty of their knowledge and sympathy, 
made Dr. Dale hesitate in his speech. This 
great public speaker seemed almost dumb 
before his hearers. He seemed to be strain- 
ing and struggling for utterance. But at 
last his rich experience of English life, his 
rich understanding and love of their history, 
the great watchwords and leaders and aims 
of his party, took possession of mind and 
heart, drafted every power into use, and made 
the whole man vocal of his truth. It was as 
though some vast volume of water, held back 



284 Vital Elements of Preaching 

by the work of man, had at last broken 
through its barriers and swept all things with 
it towards the sea. 

The sense of message is the discipline of 
sincerity and reality. It will give singleness 
of thought and purpose; the distinguishing 
marks of Chalmers and Liddon and Mac- 
laren ; of Bushnell and Beecher and Brooks. 
Alexander Maclaren said to a visitor, dis- 
cussing his knowledge for half a century of 
the English and Scotch pulpit, that the sub- 
tlety and over-refinement and vagueness of 
certain younger preachers of the Scotch 
church, compared with the distinctness and 
passionate directness of the best English 
preachers, he felt, was due to the weakening 
of the sense of message by the too exclusive 
attention to critical and literary studies. 

(b) The sense of message gives the personal 
quality to speech. It is born of personal 
vision and the sense of personal need. The 
preacher puts his own life into it and so gives 
life to others. There is no way in which the 
person is so subtly interfused with the word 
and vitalizes it. "It was real preaching; 
it made me feel so uncomfortable,' ' was one 
way of testifying to its power. "Whether 
Augustine knew truth for all men, he knew 
the sin of all men and had grappled with it 



The Sense of Message 285 

in a death grapple as that worn and marred 
face powerfully indicated.' ' 

(c) The sense of message gives the courage 
to be true. It is not an easy matter to speak 
the truth. There is always the cautioning 
voice that comes from the thought of one's 
imperfect life. There are besetments about 
the pulpit that may stifle its freedom. Shall 
it speak what men expect? what suits 
their religious and social views? Shall it 
lull men into a low content? Shall it have 
the optimism of the ostrich, burying its head 
deep in what is and refusing to see what is to 
be and what ought to be ? Shall it keep men 
in ignorance of the highest truth, or of what 
their own lives ought to be in the light of it ? 
There are many reasons for modifying truth 
and emasculating the force of the sermon. 

" There will always be a demand for smooth 
things, and an appropriate reward for him 
who is willing to supply them in the name 
of God. Popularity is a thing which will 
always be coveted ; and under certain con- 
ditions it is a thing to be thankful for. If it 
means that the truth is prevailing, and that 
men are yielding their minds to its sway, it 
is a precious gift of heaven. It is a good 
thing to see many coming out to hear the 
word of God, and to both preacher and 



286 Vital Elements of Preaching 

hearers there is a great deal of exhilaration 
and inspiration in a full church. But popu- 
larity may be purchased at too dear a rate. 
It may be bought by the suppression of the 
truth, — and the letting down of the demands 
of Christianity. There will always be a 
demand for a religion which does not agitate 
the mind too much or interfere with the pur- 
suits of a worldly life." (Stalker.) 

But the preacher is not his own master. 
He is the sent-man. He has a given word. 
He cannot really believe the truth unless he 
is faithful to it. He cannot really love men 
unless he is faithful to them. 

(d) The sense of message sustains the fervour 
of preaching. It is the routine of life that is 
so deadly for many men. It is the long 
dead level that takes the heart out of them. 
What new thing can be said upon this old 
truth? How can men be made to feel the 
truth when they have grown so callous by 
its common handling ! And so the glory 
of the morning fades into the dull gray of 
the long day. When the fire burns low and 
the word drags heavily, as it will sometimes 
with the best of men, the sense of message 
will keep a man at his task, and shed the 
light of a higher world upon it, and connect 
it with the final victory of the truth. Moral 



The Sense of Message 287 

greatness is the moving among common 
things with a sense of their divineness. 

(e) And here to sum the matter up in a 
final thought is the very secret of influence 
on the manward side. Men will forget every- 
thing save the truth when the preacher is 
bent on giving nothing but that. Such 
speech is signed with the Cross and has the 
attractive power of the Cross. Men forget 
everything, even time, when they listen to 
a man who puts his very life into his message. 
It breaks down opposition, penetrates dulness 
and indifference, and produces conviction. 
It quickens moral sluggishness and energizes 
life to divine purpose. Nothing would so 
stir the mass of indifferent, half-hearted, 
worldly Christianity as the renewed sense 
of message in the pulpit. 



LECTURE XIV. POSITIVE 
PREACHING 

II Coeinthians 4:5. "We preach not ourselves, 
but Christ Jesus, our Lord." 

I John 1:3. "That which we have seen and heard 
declare we unto you." 



LECTURE XIV 
Positive Preaching 

We must be impressed with the positive- 
ness of the Apostolic teaching. It is the key 
of all the addresses, the note of all New 
Testament writings. They were certain of 
one thing : that Jesus was the Messiah, the 
realization of Jewish history and hope, that 
God had spoken through him, that his 
death upon the Cross brought forgiveness, 
that he triumphed over the grave, that he 
was the living Lord, the giver of new life to 
men. 

They held these truths as facts, in a 
simple, untheological way, — they were slowly 
shaped into the great creedal forms by Greek 
thought and Roman law, — but they were 
unmistakable verities to the early preachers. 
They believed them with all their hearts, 
they gave their lives to them, they staked 
their all upon them, they went everywhere 
preaching them, and they spoke in a way to 
convince men of their authority. They are 
so certain of the truths, they are so bound 
together as one thing in their minds and lives, 
291 



292 Vital Elements of Preaching 

that they call it "The Word," and their 
enemies call it "The Way." 

With what accent of certitude do they 
speak ! 

" Let all the house of Israel know assuredly 
that God hath made him both Lord and 
Christ, this Jesus whom ye crucified " (Acts 
2:26). 

" This Jesus did God raise up, whereof we 
are all witnesses " (Acts 2 : 32). 

"Be it known unto you therefore, brethren, 
that through this man is proclaimed unto you 
remission of sins " (Acts 13 : 18). 

"Justified by faith, we have peace with 
God through our Lord Jesus Christ " (Rom. 
5:1). 

"Other foundation can no man lay than 
that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ " 
(I Cor. 3:11). 

"Far be it from me to glory, save in the 
cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom 
the world hath been crucified unto me and I 
unto the world " (Gal. 6 : 14). 

"Walk by the Spirit and ye shall not fulfil 
the lust of the flesh " (Gal. 5 : 16). 

"I know him, whom I have believed, and 
I am persuaded that he is able to guard that 
which I have committed unto him against 
that day " (II Tim. 1 : 12). 



Positive Preaching 293 

"We did not follow cunningly devised 
fables, when we made known unto you the 
power and presence of our Lord Jesus Christ, 
but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty" 
(II Peter 1:16). 

"That which we have seen and heard 
declare we unto you " (I John 1:3). 

"Hereby know we love, because he laid 
down his life for us ; and we ought to lay 
down our lives for the brethren " (I John 
3:16). 

"And we know that the Son of God is 
come, and hath given us an understanding, 
that we know him that is true, and we are 
in Him that is true, even in his Son, Jesus 
Christ. This is the true God and eternal 
life'' (I John 5: 20). 

These men had a message. That was the 
characteristic of their speaking. They were 
certain of their message, and they always 
spoke with the accent of conviction. They 
left men in no doubt as to their conviction 
and as to the meaning and claim of their 
message. 

1 . This positiveness is the mark of all great, 
effective preaching. A Leo the Tenth may 
keep up the splendid shell of the Church 
when the heart of its faith is eaten out and 
the priests' quips may elevate the mass. But 



294 Vital Elements of Preaching 

a Savonarola comes with a faith as strong 
as life itself and lays bare the hollow mock- 
eries of religion and calls men to the realities 
of the Gospel. Luther forces the thought 
of men through all ecclesiastical machinery 
to a living person and makes faith in that 
person the soul of religion. In an age that 
had become cool of head and cool of heart, 
sceptical of religion and sceptical of virtue, 
above all sceptical of itself, John Wesley 
believed in a Christ, able to save unto the 
uttermost, and he preached this mighty 
Saviour with a conviction and a passion that 
laid its redeeming power on men in the utter- 
most depths of sin. And in the time of the 
questioning spirit, born of the new sciences 
and the philosophies that come from them, 
when there seemed no certainty in religion 
and no foundation of morals beyond the 
variable word of human experience, men like 
Phillips Brooks have proclaimed the Gospel 
with an essentialness and inevitableness that 
awakened the sense of sonship and won men 
with the glory of the spiritual life. 

2. What is the source of positive preaching f 
It comes from personal experience. "One 
thing I know, that whereas I was blind, now 
I see." "I know in whom I have believed. " 
"That which we have heard, that which we 



Positive Preaching 295 

have seen with our eyes, that which we be- 
held, and our hands handled, concerning the 
word of life." A man who really prays does 
not long remain without proof of the power of 
prayer. He may not answer the philo- 
sophical questions that men may ask concern- 
ing it, but he knows that he is a better man 
for his prayer, and that his own faith impels 
him to ask for others the spiritual blessings 
he himself receives. That experience helps 
him to speak with the accent of certainty. 
He no more doubts prayer than he does his 
own being. He could not live without it. 
And so he speaks of the truth of prayer with 
the positiveness of experience. 

And it is the same way with any other 
religious truth. Cold, selfish hearts that 
have been broken into tenderness and re- 
pentance by the sacrifice of Christ do not 
doubt the power of the Cross. Men who 
have given way to their evil passions, who 
have felt the failure of sin and the shame of 
it, and then have turned to Christ and felt 
a hatred of sin and a new power to conquer 
it, have little trouble with the critical ques- 
tions concerning the person of Jesus. Such 
questions cannot be understood save in the 
light of human need. And the sinner may 
know the power of the Redeemer. 



296 Vital Elements of Preaching 

The preacher needs the calmness and 
strength of a Gospel based on experience. 
Books may vary, theories and philosophies 
change. The mind may be disturbed ; not 
so the life that rests on the unshaken knowl- 
edge of experience. 

" Behold I lay in Zion for a foundation a 
stone, a tried stone, a precious corner stone 
of sure foundation : he that believeth shall 
not make haste " (Isaiah 28 : 16). 

It must be remembered that this personal 
experience is of Christ, and not simply of self. 
It is not a consciousness of one's own states 
of mind and feeling, not an impressionist's 
religion, but the knowledge of what Christ 
has done in the life and for the life. The 
knowledge of Christ has been the beginning 
of faith and its growth is from that increased 
knowledge. The authority of the preacher 
is not external, from a church, a creed, or a 
Book. It is inner, in the man's personality ; 
his personal experience of the truth. But 
it is not inner in the sense of being solely 
the preacher's subjective states, his thoughts 
and feeling. The authority is also objective, 
the message from the living Christ. The 
message has helped to make the person, and 
the person is of use as he gives the message. 

It is often said the man counts to-day and 



Positive Preaching 297 

not what he believes. It is one of those 
plausible half-truths easier to make than 
laboriously to find the whole truth. "No 
man has any right in the pulpit in virtue of 
his personality or manhood in itself, but only 
in virtue of the sacramental value of his per- 
sonality for his message." (Forsyth, " Posi- 
tive Preaching," page 60.) 

"It is not our experience we preach, but 
the Christ who comes in our experience. We 
preach not ourselves, but Christ." The 
Cross is the message that makes the preacher. 

The positiveness of our preaching depends 
not on how much truth we preach, but on 
how thoroughly we believe what we do preach. 
The Christian agnosticism which marks the 
thought of the present pulpit about some doc- 
trines that were very much preached by our 
fathers may be a sign of humility and sin- 
cerity if they lead to the certainty of a deep 
experience concerning the one thing needful. 
The outworks may be abandoned if the 
central fortress is impregnable. "Our 
creeds," says Dr. Parkhurst, "have got to 
come from out of our experience of God and 
not out of our prayer-book or our confessions 
of faith. Creed is experience trying to put 
itself into forms of thought. Putting on 
leaves does not bring the spring, but the 



298 Vital Elements of Preaching 

spring coming puts on the leaves. Creeds 
will be right enough so long as experience is 
right and fresh and strong." ("The Blind 
Man's Creed.") 

If our personal experiences of life and truth 
are deep enough, if we refuse to live in books 
and theories however hard and thoroughly 
we study them, if our purpose is "ourselves 
your servants for Jesus' sake," trying to 
help men to live and so keeping our faith as 
salt and light, we shall never have a false 
adaptation to our age; we shall never dim 
or diminish the essential and eternal word of 
redemption. 

3. The need of positive preaching. Any 
true reading of modern life will convince 
us of the need of constructive work. Many 
of the old buildings had to be pulled 
down. They were badly worn by time and 
new forces, — too badly out of repair to be 
safely remodelled. The foundations of others 
had to be relaid, that a safer, fairer structure 
might be reared thereon. But that men 
badly need homes of the soul, I am sure we 
must feel. Scientific thought has rendered 
the ancestral home of faith seemingly im- 
possible to many thoughtful and earnest lives. 
If man is the product of so many generations, 
if so many subtle and complex forces of en- 



Positive Preaching 299 

vironment shape him into being, where is 
the place for God's gracious work, or for the 
freedom of the soul ? And so many reverent 
minds think they are compelled to say, "We 
do not know," to the question of a personal 
God, and his grace in Christ and the im- 
mortal life. 

And the scientific thought that has quick- 
ened and directed the historical and critical 
spirit to the origin and growth of religion has 
inevitably given new or changed conceptions 
of the Bible and the relation of Christianity 
to the ethnic faiths. In the transition be- 
tween the old, and we believe a stronger, 
faith some things have been shaken, and it is 
no wonder that many think, even within the 
Church, that all things have been shaken. 
Among good men there is distressing un- 
certainty that makes life less strong and 
triumphant. 

And among the rank and file of men there 
is the weakening of moral restraints, and the 
following of natural desires. We see enough 
to know that the entire loss of faith would be 
the complete wreck of morals. 

We see the tendency to make the Gospel 
either an ethic or a philanthropy. The 
Christian impulse remains, though the con- 
nection with the Cross is slight or sundered. 



300 Vital Elements of Preaching 

The theology is largely swept away, men say, 
but the ethics of Christ remain. It is the 
highest expression of the moral life of the 
race, and as such has authority and must be 
given a fuller application and sway. Or 
they turn to the imperfect, crippled, suffering 
lives of a majority of their fellow-men and 
they wish to help; they say with Leigh 
Hunt, 

" Write me as one who loves his fellow-men." 

But it is a dreadful misreading of life or of 
Christianity to put the chief emphasis upon 
ethics or philanthropy. The deepest fact 
of the world is sin and not suffering. The 
greatest need is not new houses, but new 
hearts. Mr. Sidney Webb, the noted Eng- 
lish writer on social questions, recently said, 
"The greatest need is not more power for 
the people, but to get the people to use the 
power they now have." That is another 
way of saying what every man knows for 
himself sooner or later, — that the real weak- 
ness of life is not in circumstances, but within, 
in the low motives, the unholy loves, the lack 
of a divine impulse ; and here is the power of 
Christianity. The Gospel is a redemption, 
and this message must be held and proclaimed 
if men are to feel this divine dynamic. 



Positive Preaching 301 

4. What are the marks of positive preaching ? 

(a) It is scriptural. It deals with those 
great truths and duties that have their 
clearest, fullest statement in the Bible and 
their embodiment in the person of Christ. 
We cannot treat the Bible in a mere casual 
way, as suggestive literature, the mere in- 
spirer of our thought. It has a growing, dis- 
tinctive, authoritative message which com- 
mands and impels us. We must rescue the 
Bible from the single text view, as a mere 
seed-thought for the preacher's inventive- 
ness. We must cultivate the free, large, 
organic view treatment of its truth, which 
is best expressed by expository teaching. 
The very text is a sign of the positivity of 
our Gospel. 

The tendency to make preaching bright 
at the expense of instruction is no doubt due 
to the demand of a people who have had little 
training in religious truth, to whom the 
Bible is largely a sealed book. And this 
problem, created by the lack of Bible knowl- 
edge in the people, can only be met by such 
preaching as will renew their interest in the 
Bible. Scripture preaching requires the great 
truths, the authoritative statement of them 
in the terms and spirit of Christ. 

Dr. Forsyth speaks of criticism redis- 



302 Vital Elements of Preaching 

covering the Bible as Luther did the Gospel, 
and then how to use such knowledge: 

"We must avoid irritating the people with 
discoveries of what it is not, and statements 
of what is upset ; and we must kindle them 
with the positive exposition of what it is now 
found to be for heart, history, faith, and 
grace. . . . Perhaps you have no idea how 
eager people are to have the Bible expounded, 
and how much they prefer you to unriddle 
what the Bible says with its large utterance, 
than to confuse them with what you can 
make it say by some ingenuity. It is thus 
you will get real preaching in the sense of 
preaching from the real situation of the Bible 
to the real situation of the time" (page 166). 

(b) Positive preaching is always constructive. 
It recognizes the limitation of human 
knowledge, and that no man or group of 
men can measure the infinite of truth. It 
must admit that others who differ may also 
have the spirit of God and see other sides 
of truth. It rejoices in everything that 
brings out and perfects the spirit of Christ. 
It seeks for the charity that embraces all 
men in the love of God. It would not force 
any man's opinion, or do injury to the most 
sensitive conscience. " Knowledge puffeth 
up, but charity buildeth up." It preaches 
faith, not doubt, in a way to support and 



Positive Preaching 303 

create faith, not to weaken the feeblest and 
most imperfect faith. It would not put a 
stumbling-block in the way of any of Christ's 
little ones. 

Preaching that is constructive never gives 
truth as the conclusion of the intellect, 
something thought out, and finding its com- 
pletion in the assent of the reason; but 
something to be lived out, to be proved and 
found by obedience, true to the life of the 
soul and the relation of man to man, and find- 
ing its verification and realization only in 
character and the life of society. Positive 
preaching seeks to present the Gospel as 
ethicized and socialized. 

(c) And, finally, positive preaching is saving 
preaching. Its message is the Evangel and it 
strives to present the message so that it will 
be a savour of life unto life and not of death 
unto death. By this sign it can be told from 
the dogmatic spirit. It does not condemn the 
world, it does not sit in the seat of the Al- 
mighty and decide the fate of men. It has 
the pity and yearning of the Friend of Sin- 
ners. It tries to stand in Christ's place, 
persuading men to be reconciled to God, 
and by all the behaviour of life and speech, 
it would give a persuasive, saving Gospel. 

" Preachers will again stand in the pulpit 
as the messengers of God, rebuking men 



304 Vital Elements of Preaching 

boldly for their sins in the name of the eternal, 
and assuring the penitent of the Divine 
mercy, declaring with confidence that Christ 
has finished the work of salvation, and offer- 
ing that salvation without money and with- 
out price unto all who believe. There will 
be a sure word for the minister to carry to 
the guilty sinner whose conscience cries 
aloud in its agony, and a comfortable word 
for the dying, when they are face to face 
with eternity. There will be a revival of 
religion throughout the land which never 
has come and never will come save by the 
preaching of the Gospel, which will strengthen 
the Church throughout all her borders, and 
revive every missionary and charitable cause 
in our land. What can never be done by 
learning or ritual shall be accomplished before 
our eyes, when the voice of the Gospel is 
once more heard in its fulness, throughout 
the land which it blessed in the past and 
again will bless. We are in the valley now 
where the shadows lie heavy, but already 
the East is reddening, and we shall live to 
see the feet of God's messengers, beautiful 
upon the mountains, because they are bring- 
ing good tidings of good, because they are 
publishing salvation." (Dr. John Watson, 
"The Return of the Gospel.") 



LECTURE XV. THE MASTER'S 
METHOD 

Matt. 7:29. "He taught them as one having 
authority and not as the scribes." 
John 7 : 46. "Never man so spake." 



LECTURE XV 

The Master's Method 

I wish to close this course on some of the 
vital elements of preaching with a brief 
study of Jesus as the preacher. He who 
gave the message must have something to 
say to us on how to give it. He knew what 
was in man, and he knew how to speak to 
man, and his words called forth the wonder 
and praise of men. They called forth the 
best in men. Here also he is our highest 
example. And while there is so much beyond 
even our thought in his perfect life, it is well 
for us to dwell upon the imitableness of his 
example. What can we learn from the 
Master's method of preaching? 

He certainly believed in preaching. He 
certainly had faith in the spoken word. He 
left not a single written word. The only 
record we have of his writing is the stooping 
down and writing with his finger on the sand 
to hide his mingled shame and sorrow at the 
hardness of men. There certainly never was 
such faith in the power of speech. He 
307 



308 Vital Elements of Preaching 

staked his kingdom on the vitality of the 
spoken word. He staked his all upon it. 
The message that was to be the life of the 
world was trusted to the memory of the few 
eager hearts that heard him. 

The oral method was the chief method of 
the day. Men were trained to listen and 
to hand down with exactness what they heard. 

We cannot claim that the oral method has 
the same relative importance to-day; we 
must rejoice that the pulpit to-day has so 
many allies, that the Providence of God has 
so multiplied the ways of teaching the world. 
But the life of faith is propagated by life, 
and one unchanging way of expressing life 
is by speech. That is our calling. And we 
should gain increased faith in it as the en- 
during and vital method from the example 
of Jesus. 

Those who heard Jesus speak were deeply 
impressed by it. Matthew records the fact 
that the people were astonished at his doc- 
trine, for he spoke "as one having authority 
and not as the scribes." 

I wish that we could think ourselves back 
into that spring morning of Galilee and feel 
again the very impressions made by that 
hill-sermon. Of course, we cannot do that. 
The word and the speaker so far away have 



The Master's Method 309 

helped to make us what we are; they are 
the common thoughts of our hearts; the 
atmosphere in which we live. 

A man speaks to us. He lays his master- 
ful spell over our minds. There is no trick 
in it, if the sway is true and constant. It is 
through laws of the mind that God himself 
has made. How does the speaker have real 
authority? By the truths he speaks, the 
way he speaks, and the man that speaks. 
And in thinking of Jesus as a preacher we 
must consider these elements blended in his 
personality. 

I. The truth that Jesus spoke was not 
original in the sense of never having been 
spoken before. He built on the past; he 
received from others. The doctrines of 
God, man, immortality, the Messianic idea, 
were truths common to the Jewish Scrip- 
tures. He had deep reverence for the proph- 
ets who had spoken before him. Fre- 
quent parallels are quoted from the writings 
of Jewish scribes gathered in the Talmud. 
Sentiments approximating the Sermon on 
the Mount are found in the sacred books of 
other nations, in the sayings of Confucius 
and Laotzi and Gautama. But we can well 
believe that the total impression of Christ's 
words was something wonderfully fresh and 



310 Vital Elements of Preaching 

real and vital. It went right to the souls 
of men ; it awoke echoes of inmost, yet un- 
realized aspirations; it called up visions 
and hopes of a new world and yet a world 
for which they were born. "He spoke with 
authority and not as the scribes.' ' 

While Jesus reverenced the Old Testa- 
ment, and built his message upon it, he was 
independent towards the temporary and non- 
essential elements of that teaching, and he 
handled with loving fearlessness the current 
beliefs of his day. He selected and rejected 
as he saw the truth. He gave his own 
emphasis to it that made it new truth as 
much as the touch of Shakespeare re-created 
the old plays and chronicles of his age. And 
he spoke out of his own life what no prophet 
had seen before, that which he had received 
of the Father. 

The people were astonished at his doctrine. 
They were not used to such boldness of speak- 
ing. We can yet see the sharp and fearless 
flashing of these eternal verities. How little 
he cares for custom and prejudice when they 
hide God and duty from the soul ! He loves 
men too supremely to keep them in ignorance. 
The truth shall be declared with all plain- 
ness though it may be startling and para- 
doxical and revolutionary. Men need to 



The Master's Method 311 

know the truth for through it alone are life 
and liberty. 

Christ speaks his message as primitive, 
universal, and necessary truths. No shib- 
boleths of party can be fostered by them ; 
no narrow and sectional spirit can come from 
them. They are for all men and for all time. 
The highest life can only come from the 
broadest truth. 

And you notice how these truths seem to 
come forth spontaneously, gushing forth 
from the great fountain of his life. No doubt 
in many ways he had to learn them, — the 
perfect vision did not come at once. But 
in his speaking there are no gradual and 
cautious approaches to truth. He knows 
them as his own life and out of his own life 
and so he speaks. He does not argue about 
the person of God. He takes the fact and 
the faith for granted ; everything rests upon 
it and comes from it ; he manifests God. 
He does not prove the soul of man. He 
speaks straight to the soul and the soul 
knows its Master. 

Christ does not appeal to the traditions of 
men, to other great teachers, but to the 
supreme authority of truth. He laid bare 
the foundations of moral truth covered up by 
men. Traditions had turned its life into a 



312 Vital Elements of Preaching 

petrifaction. "The sayings of the elders 
have more weight than those of the proph- 
ets/ ' was a maxim of the time. Hillel 
mispronounced a word because his teacher 
before him had done so. The foundation 
stones of the great temple of Ephesus were 
buried twenty feet deep by the washing and 
drifting of the centuries. Men had to dig 
down through the deposit to lay bare the 
truth of the past. And that is what Christ 
did. The great spiritual principles of the 
law had been covered up by the constant 
accretions of human thought and desire. 
Christ lays them bare and men see again how 
firm and divine they are. 

And Christ does more than this. He de- 
clares a new era. The essential truths of 
the law shall remain, the eternal and uni- 
versal principles of right and wrong. But 
certain forms shall pass away ; certain truths 
adapted to the age shall be superseded by 
the more spiritual principles. He was the 
fulfilment of the law. Its truth and beauty 
and power were to be seen and felt in him- 
self. No longer a law, but a life, whom to 
know is to love and to obey. " All's law, yet 
all's love." They revered the Fathers ; they 
worshipped their Scriptures. But Christ 
declares Himself greater than both. "But 



The Master's Method 313 

I say unto you — " He speaks with personal 
authority. 

Christ not only claims the right to change 
the old and declare new truth ; but, as their 
spiritual King, men are bound to obey his 
word, and he will stand at last as their Judge. 

It becomes us to walk reverently in the 
presence of Jesus ; but may we not say that 
in giving the message, we are to follow his 
example ? 

We are to regard the past, know what men 
have thought and taught concerning the 
Gospel, that we may have the true perspec- 
tive of faith, that we may have the spirit of 
reverence and humility before the generations 
of experience. Our faith is a priceless heri- 
tage, which we are to touch with no profane 
hands. The spirit of God has taught the 
line of noble scholars and devoted servants 
of Christ, and the creeds of the Church are 
the best expressions of what they have found 
true of the Gospel. We need the historic 
sense ; the persistence and the sobriety that 
come from the unity of faith. 

But we can never speak with authority, 
if we have the spirit of the scribes; if we 
are content to repeat what other men have 
found. It will not be true to us unless in a 
veritable sense we have the discovery for 



314 Vital Elements of Preaching 

ourselves, unless creeds and the Church help 
us to interpret the living Christ, unless each 
man receive for himself the Word of God. 

The conception of the Gospel cannot be a 
fixed and changeless conception. Its life is 
in its growth. Each generation brings new 
problems into the field, new demands upon 
the truth; and the preacher loyal to his 
Master will rejoice in the task, and try to 
understand and interpret the truth that 
makes the Christ the old yet ever new mes- 
sage, the " Eternal Contemporary." 

Jesus spoke to his own people. But twice, 
I think, does the record speak of his going 
beyond the bounds of Palestine. And he 
rarely ministered to any others than Jews. 
He was literally sent to the house of Israel. 
This man who first had the world-wide view 
of religion, who first taught us to think of 
men as mankind, to whom the differences 
of race, and tongue and creed are superficial, 
whose breadth in "Our Father" we imper- 
fectly understand, and whose "Go ye, there- 
fore, and make disciples of all nations" the 
Church has so partially obeyed, shut his 
own ministry up to a small parish. 

He spoke to many at times. He had power 
over the multitudes. The people heard him 
gladly. But he was never swept by the 



The Master's Method 315 

thought of numbers. He spoke to Andrew 
and Levi, to Simon and the woman of 
Sychar, with the same interest and purpose 
as to the multitudes that followed him. He 
was entirely free from self-seeking or false 
self-assertion. He thought only of truth 
and the life of men. The desire for the ears 
of the crowd never affected the grace or the 
truth of his word. He was a teacher as 
much as a preacher. In speaking to the 
many, he had a few chosen souls in mind, 
the open and eager hearts, the men bound 
to him by friendship ; and these, in public 
and private, he trained in patience and 
hope, thus stamping upon these sensitive 
plates the impress of his own life, and send- 
ing them forth to make innumerable copies. 

And in his message he is single, — narrow, 
if you please. He spoke the one truth of 
the Kingdom of God. Infinite in its applica- 
tion, limitless in its influence, he gave the 
message to the individual soul. Never in 
reformer, ecclesiast, patriot, did he lose his 
single and supreme work of prophet. Dr. 
Jefferson finely says, in his "The Character of 
Jesus" : 

"He made an impression because he 
stayed in one place and hit the same nail on 
the head until it was driven completely in. 



316 Vital Elements of Preaching 

Had he wandered over the earth, speaking 
his parables, they would have fallen into 
more ears, but moulded fewer hearts. By- 
staying in Palestine, and keeping his heart 
close to a few chosen hearts, he became in- 
creasingly influential. The men who were 
nearest to him became so passionately in 
love with him that they were ready to die 
for him. He made himself thus mighty by 
limiting himself. It is with men as it is 
with rivers; a river becomes a river only 
by the assistance of its banks. Take away 
its banks, and the river becomes a swamp. 
By limiting himself, our Lord came off con- 
queror. . . . Jesus attempted to do one 
thing only, and that was to perform the 
work which his Father had given him to do. 
At the end of his life he could look into his 
Father's face and say, — 'I have finished 
the work which thou gavest me to do.'" 

There is surely a great principle here for 
every man who would be a true preacher. 
The largest work in the world can be done 
by doing the best work for those whom God 
has given you. The gifts to reach the mul- 
titude are to be craved and cultivated, but 
he does most for the Kingdom of God who 
so speaks that men will become new creatures 
and grow unto a perfect man. One man 



The Master's Method 317 

transformed is a greater work than a thou- 
sand men simply drawn to the preacher. "I 
would rather see one man practising one of 
my sermons, " said Theodore Parker, "than 
hear all men praise them." 

And in this work of changing men the 
preacher must give the word of redemption. 
He loses his power if he fails to exalt the one 
message. The Gospel is as wide as human 
destiny and touches every interest of man, 
but it goes to the extremities of human life 
only through the force of its heart. The 
preacher must give the heart of the Gospel. 

II. Jesus was the Master of the oral method. 
The way he spoke to men is only less re- 
markable than his message. Dr. Griffith- 
Jones says, " Preachers and teachers will 
find a rich reward in entering thus seriously 
for themselves into the study of the method 
of the Master, who spoke as never man 
spake, and who adapted his message to 
His audience with a tact so unfailing and a 
wisdom so wonderful that its impressiveness 
is traceable almost as much to its perfect 
form as to its divine and saving power.' ' 

Five qualities mark the speech of Jesus. 
It was simple, vivid, concrete, portable, and 
incorruptible. 

It was simple. The profoundest truth was 



318 Vital Elements of Preaching 

spoken in the speech of every day, and men 
could not fail to know what he meant. 
He spoke to no class but to the common in- 
telligence and wants of men. He did not 
use the language of professional religion, but 
the language of life. The common people 
heard him gladly, and to the poor the Gospel 
was preached. It had singleness of thought 
and singleness of aim, and everything he said 
made this known. He always had the sense 
of God, and his own life was so single and 
so consistent that everything he did and 
everything he said, the most spontaneous 
and unpremeditated, revealed something of 
God. And so with his sense of the worth 
of man, — every touch of life, every word 
to the heart, the whole attitude toward life, 
the spirit and method of dealing with in- 
dividual cases, tell what he thinks of man. 

Here is the moral condition of simplicity 
of speech, — singleness of life, — and where 
this is strong, the simplicity of form is sure 
to follow. Take Christ's warning against 
anxiety in the sixth chapter of Matthew. 
Is there anything more simple and beautiful, 
too, in the literature of the spoken word? 
Could any mind fail to get its truth ? 

And his speech was vivid. It was put so 
that men felt it. It flashed like a diamond 



The Master's Method 319 

or cut like a sword-blade. It was a picture, 
and men saw it. The truth was not dim 
and vague and abstract, demanding the 
closest attention and to be received after 
long and hard process of reasoning, but it 
fairly stood before them in visible form and 
colour. 

"Ye are the salt. Ye are the light. If 
the eye be single, the whole body is full of 
light. Lay up for yourselves treasures in 
heaven. By their fruits ye shall know them. 
He that putteth his hands to the plough, and 
looketh back, is not fit for the Kingdom of 
God." 

Was ever clearer, stronger word spoken? 
There is not an opaque word in it. Every 
word makes its quickest, strongest appeal to 
the thought and feeling of men. 

And then the style is concrete. Christ 
makes use of current events, and familiar 
figures on the street, and well-known stories 
and popular proverbs and visible scenes to 
convey the sense of reality in what he says. 
Somewhere on the hillside men were sowing 
the seed and he was giving the immortal 
parable of the sower. A man had been 
robbed on the Jericho road and in the story 
of the Good Samaritan Jesus gave such a 
definition of neighbour that the quibbling 



320 Vital Elements of Preaching 

lawyer confessed its truth. Dives and Laz- 
arus, Simon and the sinful woman, the 
Pharisee and the Publican are as familiar 
figures as any that walk our streets. How 
this concreteness stands out everywhere in 
Christ's speaking ! Truth is a life. In him 
is life and the life is the light of men. 

It follows from this that Jesus' speech is 
portable. People carried it away. They 
could not forget it. Parable and paradox 
and epigram challenged attention and stuck 
in the memory. The picture, the story, lives 
long after the abstract principle is forgotten. 
" Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit 
the earth. No man can serve two masters. 
He that saveth his life shall lose it. To him 
that hath shall be given. Come ye blessed 
of my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared 
for you from the foundation of the world." 
Largely upon this unforgetable form of 
truth depend the riches of the Gospel to-day. 

The incorruptible quality of Jesus' speech 
I need barely mention. As hatred and op- 
position grew around him, he was led to 
veil the thought in parables, the story pre- 
serving the form of the teaching unchanged 
while the truth would be sought by those 
eager to be taught. 

Jesus has taught us as no other that 



The Master's Method 321 

nature and life are full of God, that every- 
where there are symbols of truth for the 
open heart. No man loved nature better, 
and none loved man so well. And this 
wealth of pictorial truth came not only from 
his full, rich life, but from the love that 
used all for the service of men. Nothing 
ministers to beauty alone, but all is the ser- 
vant of the soul. 

The preaching that interests, and instructs 
and persuades to noble life, must have the 
pictorial element, the symbolism of nature 
and of life. And such forms are the inevi- 
table expression of strong natures that think 
keenly and feel deeply and have the master- 
ing purpose of saving men. 

III. There must be one thought more. 
We can analyze words and manner, but a 
more subtle element lies back of them, which 
gives the sermon its final authority, the power 
of a life. The best preaching is a life. Men 
cannot understand truth until it is put into 
human experience. Men cannot feel its 
power save in the touch of a human hand 
and the pulse of a human heart. There was 
something attractive, convincing, transform- 
ing in the personality of Jesus. He lived 
the truth that he spoke. He was all and 
more than he taught. He alone can say, 



322 Vital Elements of Preaching 

with simple and matchless humility, "I am 
the truth ! " How can we measure this ? 
What experience of ours is deep enough to 
penetrate into this mystery? 

We can practise something of his fellow- 
ship with the Father, we can try to follow 
his loyalty to truth at whatever cost, we 
can grow in the supreme note of love for 
men, which will give insight, sympathy, 
power. To grow into a perfect man, unto 
the fulness of the stature of Christ, is the 
ambition and hope of the spiritual preacher. 

The sainted Tholuck, who was the spirit- 
ual father of thousands, who spoke in the 
pulpit and in the school and in the best 
literature of the century, gave as the single 
secret of his life, — "I have but one passion, 
and that is Christ." And Charles Kingsley, 
who spoke to men as few others of his day, 
once said to one who asked concerning the 
secret of his life, one near enough to have 
the right to ask such an intimate question, — 
"I have a friend." 



INDEX 



Adversaries, to the preacher, 

26. 
Age, knowledge of the, 207; 

appreciation of, 208 ; the 

language of, 213 ; truth 

adapted to, 214. 
Arnold, Matthew, "Dover 

Beach," 39. 
Atonement, the form of the 

age, 217. 

B 

Babcock, Maltbie, the chil- 
dren's sermon, 141 ; saying 
of, 129. 

Baxter, Richard, the comfort 
of his people, 131. 

Boyd-Carpenter, Bishop, on 
the preacher and his age, 
205. 

Broadus, John A., his inter- 
pretation of the heart, 81. 

Brooks, Phillips, Easter Ser- 
mon, 136; chief motive of 
the ministry, 18 ; story 
of, at Harvard, 172. 

Browning, Robert, "By the 
Fireside," 121 ; quotation 
from "Christina," 76 ; from 
"Rabbi Ben Ezra," 202. 

Browning, Mrs., "The Cry 
of the Human," 37. 

Bushnell, Horace, "Dignity of 
human nature shown from 
its ruins," 75; preaching 
to children, 141 ; the mys- 
tery of speech, 226. 



Campbell, R. J., illustration 

of a child, 147. 
Chadwick, John W., poem of, 

257. 
Children's Sermons, methods 

of, 143. 
Clifford, John, a sermon to 

children, 148. 
Clow, W. W., a sermon to 

children, 151. 
Coleridge, " Hymn in the Vale 

of Chamouni," 12. 
Commercialism, its influence 

on our life, 29. 
Courage, and the power of the 

preacher, 45. 
Critical Temper, effect upon 

religious life, 31. 
Crooker, "The Church of 

To-day," 212. 

D 

Denial, witness of, 38. 

Devereux, General, experi- 
ence in railroad riots of '79, 
41. 

E 

Education, its threefold pur- 
pose, 226. 

F 

Faber, hymn of, 128. 

Faith, and the power of the 

preacher, 45. 
Faunce, President, education 



323 



324 



Index 



of the minister by his task, 

108; insight of modern 

preachers, 111. 
Field, Eugene, "Last night, as 

my dear babe lay dead," 

134. 
Financial honour, essential to 

uprightness, 168. 
Foreign missionary, example 

of the personal touch, 101. 



Garvie, A. E., a sermon to 

children, 150. 
God, transcendence of, 10 ; 

immanence of, 11. 
Gordon, George A., character- 
ization of, 177. 
Growth, the law of life, 185 ; 

the demand of the age, 185 ; 

the hindrances to, 188 ; 

direction of, 195; how 

gained? 199. 
Guthrie, Thomas, and St. 

John's, Edinburgh, 42. 



Hall, Dr. John, simplicity of, 

228. 
Hawthorne, simplicity of, 237. 
Hay, John, his prophecy 

concerning the Chinaman, 

59. 
Holland, J. G., "Vices of the 

Imagination," 77. 
Home, C. Silvester, a sermon 

to children, 149. 
Horton, R. F., on receiving the 

Word of God, 251. 



Immortal life, comfort of, 130 

hymns of, 130. 
Interpretation, cost of, 254. 
Isaiah, the call of, 8. 



Jefferson, C. E., a sermon to 
children, 155; "The Build- 
ing of the Church," 191. 

Jesus, at Jacob's well, 53 ; 
a revealer of life, 54; 
boldness of speech, 310 ; 
personal authority, 312 ; 
word to his own people, 
314; word to individuals, 
315 ; master of the oral 
method, 317 ; reverence for 
the Scriptures, 309 ; speech 
simple, 317; vivid, 318; 
concrete, 319; portable, 
320 ; incorruptible, 320. 



Kingsley, Charles, father-con- 
fessor to his people, 86 ; 
finding men by their leading 
ideas, 98 ; the secret of his 
life, 322. 

Kipling, "Go to your work 
and be strong," 181. 



Labour, organized, and the 
Church, 35. 

London, Bishop of, simplicity 
of preaching, 146. 

Loneliness, sorrow of, 123. 

Loyalty, an element of manli- 
ness, 164. 



M 

Maclaren, Alexander, interpre- 
tation of the Scriptures, 71. 

Magnanimity, and effective- 
ness of the preacher, 43 ; an 
element of manliness, 165. 

Manhood, its threefold de- 
mand, 179. 



Index 



325 



Meditation, a means of re- 
ceiving the Word, 250. 

Message, and the age, 277 ; a 
knowledge of life, 280 
cost of its expression, 259 
effect on the preacher, 282 
how gain the sense of ? 274 
intellectual and moral 
sources, 279 ; justification 
of the preacher, 269 ; mark 
of the preacher, 265 ; moral 
quality of, 281. 

Morgan, Campbell, influence 
of, at Westminster Chapel, 
22. 



N 



his 



Newman, John Henry, 

first awakening, 85. 
Newton, Richard, children's 

sermons, 157. 
Novelists, and faith, 34. 



Oppenheim, James, quotation 

from, 173. 
Owen, John, relation to his 

age, 209. 

P 

Parker, Joseph, and the chil- 
dren, 145. 

Paul, his knowledge of the 
secret heart, 80 ; vision 
of the man of Macedonia, 
55. 

Plagiarism, of doctrine, 253. 

Phelps, Austin, on the minis- 
try of comfort, 117; on 
reaching the people, 105. 

Poets, modern, and faith, 33. 

Positiveness, marks of, in 
preaching, 301 ; of great 
preaching, 293 ; need of, 
298 ; source of, in preach- 
ing, 294. 



Prayer, a means of receiving 

the Word, 251. 
Preacher, The, love of his 

calling, 201 ; plan for his 

studies, 200. 
Preaching, authority of, 274 ; 

demand for, 271 ; cost of, 

249; positive, 291. 



Realism, of the sermon, 90. 
Riggs, S. R., his thoughts of 

the Indian, 59. 
Robertson, Fred W., "The 

Loneliness of Christ," 124. 

S 

Saints, use of word in Paul's 
letters, 56. 

Schauffler, Robert H., poem, 
"Scum o' the Earth," 61. 

Sermons, barriers to success 
in, 245 ; the wrong notion 
of, 243. 

Sex-relations, the minister 
tested by, 168. 

Sill, E. R., poem, "Oppor- 
tunity," 46. 

Simplicity of speech, illustra- 
tion of, 224 ; how gain ? 
229; moral qualities, 236; 
a relative matter, 225 ; 
reasons for, 227 ; rhetorical 
sources, 237. 

Sin, a deeper interpretation of, 
217. 

Smith, George Adam, message 
of the prophets to all times, 
7. 

Smith, Henry B., experience 
of, 14. 

Social idealism, true interpre- 
tation of, 212. 

Social unrest, in America, 35. 

Spurgeon's insight into life, 80. 



326 



Index 



Stokes, a ministry to men, 174. 
Sympathy, and the effective- 
ness of the preacher, 43. 



Temperament, the preacher's, 
193 ; temptations of, 194. 

Tholuck, the secret of his 
life, 322. 

Tucker, William J., sensuous 
nature of the age, 27. 



U 

Uprightness, an element 
manliness, 166. 



of 



Van Dyke, Henry, 
Toiling of Felix," 181. 



"The 



Voluntary Christianity, its 
weakness, 99. 



W 

Watson, John, importance of 
style, 261 ; ministry in the 
Highlands, 62 ; humanness 
in the sermon, 103 ; minis- 
try of comfort, 118; "The 
Potter's Wheel," 133; the 
work of a pastor, 257; "The 
Return of the Gospel," 304 ; 
why an interpreter? 258. 

Wesley, John, style of, 90. 

Wordsworth, ' ' Expostulation 
and Reply," 270. 



Youth, sorrows of, 122. 



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